The Optic Reed has a Haste Harm

On reflection my last post is unsatisfactory as a work of troll history, since it relies almost entirely on dubious chains of 'what-might-have-beens', rather than on looking at what actually happened with a different eye. It does not seriously attempt to explore all the plausible counter-factuals, so neither I nor you can take it very seriously. For example, without the stimulus of the American Revolution it is probable that all the dark monstrosities embryo in the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire might just have gestated longer, erupting a generation or two later and plunging Europe into an even uglier paroxysm. Perhaps this would have been the utopian revolution that set the Americas aflame, with even worse consequences for freedom and prosperity there; perhaps a greater Napoleon would have arisen, one who had more success in conquering Europe; perhaps he would have established an Empire as iconoclastic, inhuman, and enduring as the Soviet Empire; and the last round of the 'Napoleonic Wars' might have been fought with the weapons of the 20th century.

This post might possibly be considered another bite at the cherry of troll history. But it is a thesis that I take a great deal more seriously and have thought about much longer. I have mentioned it before a couple of times in throwaway lines. It is probably of less interest to the two of you who remain my gentle readers: but it is the post that kept me awake composing itself in my head all night, so here it is.

I've read three books of relatively late Chesterton essays (from the 20s and 30s) in the past two days, and taking them in such a concentrated dose I can sympathise with Orwell's celebrated 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians' observation. I fear Chesterton became far too Bellocised at the end. His recurrent theme is 'All roads lead to Rome' and he constantly hammers Belloc's theme of 'The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith'.

Chesterton (and Belloc) point to the Catholic Church as this thing that is attacked now from one side, now from another, remaining the same and defending the same sane centre from attack by different sorts of heretics who spin off and blaze furiously for a few generations before fading away to nothing. It is the rock that stands firm, the foundation of Christendom, and without it we lose the good of the intellect and drift off into moods and fads that drag us ineluctably towards the pit. See, for instance, this quote here about the various avenues of Protestant attack on the Catholic Church over the past few hundred years:

What was the meaning of the feud, so constant and so inconsistent? That question took a long time to answer and would now take much too long a time to record. But it led me at last to the only logical answer, which every fact of life now confirms; that the thing is hated, as nothing else is hated, simply because it is, in the exact sense of the popular phrase, like nothing on earth.

Now, when I was in Devil Bunny City, still trying to be a Catholic, I attended an event held by one of the Catholic student societies at Devil Bunny City University that was a sort of meet-and-greet/question-and-answer with the Coptic student society. The Copts are Monophysites. That means they are of the minority party in a theological dispute of the 5th century. They haven't had anything to do with Rome for over 1500 years. They believe in the Sacraments, the Mass, Apostolic Succession, the veneration of Saints, prayers for the dead, are devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and maintain a dead language for liturgical purposes. The Coptic students would no more have dreamed of kicking out their Pope Shenouda III and relying on private interpretation of the Bible to guide their way than we would have dreamed of kicking out Pope John Paul II. They had no interest in ordaining female or homosexual priests. They were much more like us than any sort of Protestant.

What these very articulate and polite Coptic students asked probing and well-informed questions about at this meeting were the novel doctrines introduced in the Catholic Church in recent centuries. Papal Infallibility bugged them. The Immaculate Conception bugged them. From their point of view, we were the radical wing of Christianity: we were the ones spinning out crazy new ideas and adding them to the ancient truths of Christianity, from the filioque clause through the imposition of the discipline of clerical celibacy, the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception, the megalomania of Pastor Aeturnus, to the acceptance of periodic abstinence in Humanae Vitae.

And the Copts are not the only ones. From the East, that is what the Catholic Church looks like. The Churches of the East are the conservative wing of Christianity. Whether they are Serbian Orthodox or Syriac Orthodox, they are with the Copts on all these things. Their liturgies and practices are instantly recognisable to Catholics as 'Catholic'; they do the things Catholics used to do. It was only my Serbian Orthodox colleague who gave up meat for Lent. It was only my Syriac Orthodox colleague who went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And these Churches are united, no matter how long they have been separated politically from Rome or from each other, in rejecting the innovations that had come from Rome and sticking with the faith they had been left by the Apostles. These small autocephalous Churches, without claiming universal jurisdiction, have been more like rocks than the Roman Catholic Church of Western Christendom. Clearly, whatever it is that God wants to see preserved through the vicissitudes of history has been equally well-preserved. if not better preserved, in the East. Not all roads lead to Rome: there is obviously a road to Cairo, a road to Belgrade, a road to Antioch, etc...

Chesterton and Belloc are like hypothetical young Labor Party organisers who have spent their entire career in Marrickville, having to campaign against a motley collection of incoherent Trotskyite moonbats, sugar pixies, and hippy-dippy freakazoids. They are the Conservative party in their patch of space and time, and you can imagine them (with enough mental agility) not even realising that elsewhere, their party is the Radical one. Compared to the whole expanse of Christianity in space and time, Western Europe in the early 20th century looms about as large as Marrickville does in New South Wales. Chesterton and Belloc were the Conservative party in their patch of space and time: but they are part of the Radical wing of Christianity, not the Conservative one.

My take home message from this was that political unity is not important to God. He doesn't want us all in one Church with one leader.

Another dispiriting feature of the Chesterton's Bellocisation is the anti-semitism that creeps into a lot of his later essays. I feel very strongly that if you are going to cleave to Christendom, if you are going to extoll Christendom and work for the triumph of Christendom, you have a special responsibility to be on guard against and excoriate in yourself the particular sins and failings that Christendom is susceptible to: and the greatest of these is Jew-hatred. It seems to me that the exact same quote of Chesterton's could be applied to with equal justice to that other religious group, which has been persecuted for some hundreds of years longer than Christianity has existed, and has somehow stayed firm like a rock through all the vicissitudes of history - without ever having the support of powerful states; without ever claiming universal jurisdiction; without promising the Golden Carrots of the Hesperides or wielding the stick of Eternal Damnation:

What was the meaning of the feud, so constant and so inconsistent? That question took a long time to answer and would now take much too long a time to record. But it led me at last to the only logical answer, which every fact of life now confirms; that the thing is hated, as nothing else is hated, simply because it is, in the exact sense of the popular phrase, like nothing on earth.

A metapost that makes no sense without reference to Marco's Blog

All the action is happening on Facebook, Marco tells us.

(1) It is splendid to see this discussion happening on Facebook. This is the sort of thing I had hoped to find on Facebook. Well done!

(2) It is terrible that you have abandoned your blog, winstoninabox :(

(3) Nathanael, have you read an English translation of the Qur'an yet? Have you spoken to any Copts? I am afraid the only thing that really irritated me in this thread was your cavalier roundhead abandonment of 60% of Christian history (4th December 11:37).

(4) And last in order of importance, this whole argument is another illustration of our society's grotesque lack of any sense of proportion.

Civil marriage is an empty contract in our country. It has been white-anted by no-fault divorce, by the extension of the legal benefits of marriage to de facto couples, by the extension of the legal obligations of marriage to de facto couples, and by the refusal of the banks and the courts to countenance the level of trust traditionally expected between married people. I recognise there are good reasons for these changes, and they were made sincerely by people thinking they were doing the right thing. Nevertheless, their net effect has been to make civil marriage a contract unique in its lack of legal benefits or penalties for non-compliance to the parties to the contract. Those were the ditches to fight in. It is too late. So I don't care if such meaningless 'marriage' is extended to homosexual couples, or polyamatory relationships, or interspecific cohabitation, or pairings between blocks of granite considered by the Cult of Zorr to be avatars of the God H'jaa and Goddess P'zorth.

In the words of the Preacher of Ecclesiastes: 'Meaningless, meaningless! All is meaningless.'

You know, there are still some countries where homosexuals are killed. Not by their bigoted neighbors, but by the government. I think this is more important.

The 16th Century: The Golden Age of the Blog?

I have been carrying the wrong date around in my head for at least a decade. Felix Manz, evangelist, thinker, and martyr, was drowned in the Limmat on January 5th, 1527, not January 21st, 1525. The earlier date was when he began his public ministry. So have a few minutes on the internet educated me.

Before the internet, the last big advance in technology for people to communicate their thoughts to other people was movable type. This had all sorts of profound social and political consequences which you can look up for yourselves on the internet.

Basically, if you wanted to communicate your ideas to posterity, before movable type you either needed really compelling ideas that made lots of other people want to copy them out longhand, or ideas backed up with enough money and/or power that you could compel lots of other people to copy them out longhand. This was a high bar to get over, so the quality of the ideas communicated to us from the time before the invention of movable type is generally high.

Once movable type was invented, all you needed was a relatively trivial amount of money, and you could communicate whatever thoughts popped into your head to every town that spoke your language within weeks or months. If you disagreed with something someone else wrote, you could dash off a pamphlet letting the world know, and a few weeks or months later they would do the same, usw. The content of the resulting deluge of pamphlets will be reassuringly familiar to anyone browsing the net today. The hyperbole, the rapid-fire cut and thrust of responses, the bees in bonnets, the self-righteous separation into self-reinforcing cliques- it is all so very familiar.

From the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica:

"In Germany, the cradle of printing, the pamphlet (Flugschrift) was soon a recognized and popular vehicle of thought, and the fierce religious controversies of the Reformation period afforded a unique opportunity for its use. ... In general their tone was extremely intemperate, and they formed, as one authority has described those of a century later, "a mass of panegyric, admonition, invective, controversy and scurrility." ... attempts were made in pamphlets to justify almost every action, however unjust or dishonourable, while at the same time those who held different opinions were mercilessly and scurrilously attacked."


I don't know if Felix Manz was the first Protestant killed by other Protestants for having the wrong ideas, but he was early enough- January 5th 1527 is less than ten years after the 'beast of the wild wood' (to use Gerard Manley Hopkins delightfully un-ecumenical phrase) nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg. That's what happens when people get carried away with these new technologies for communicating their ideas. He has stuck in my mind since I first heard about him because of how shockingly early in the Reformation he was judicially murdered, and because some of my ancestors almost certainly had a hand in his death, as the branch of our family that has been traced furthest back has been traced to 16th century Zurich.

Here is a sample of Felix Manz's dangerously inflammatory opinions:

"Charity alone is pleasing to God; he that cannot show charity, has no part with God. The unadulterated love of Christ puts to flight the enemy. It is incumbent upon him that will be an heir of Christ, to be merciful, as the Father in heaven is merciful."

Hey Nato!

...I notice that winstoninabox just left a comment for you back on an October 2006 post- the 8th of October, I think it is. In short, he has moved- and I am seconding the motion- that you outline, and then defend, your concept of Hell. Are you willing to rise to the challenge?
And when are you going to update your blog already?

A response to the Second Comment of Nato on the Reformation

Quoth Nato:

The key thing that the Reformation began the process of was to make clear the distinction between:

1. Church as Institution / Organisation / Structure, with truth mediated by a single divinely appointed, infallible 'priestly' human authority (i.e. the Pope);

2. Church as Body/Organism/Relationship (certainly the focus of NT Teaching), with truth freely available to all and mediated by Christ alone, through Scripture alone. The priesthood is made up of all who believe.

I think if you will look at history, Nato, you will find that the distinction between Church as Institution/Organisation/Structure and Body/Organism/Relationship has been very clear in people’s minds for a very long time before the Reformation and the relationship between the two has been the vital dynamic in all Christian societies.

I’m not seeking to defend the words ‘infallible’ or ‘i.e.’ in your definition of Church as Institution, but to attack the words ‘through Scripture alone’ in your definition of Church as Body of Christ. The words ‘infallible’ and ‘i.e.’ define the difference between the Roman Catholic church and all the other Christian churches, while the words ‘through Scripture alone’ define the difference between the Protestant churches and all the other Christian churches. But there is much more to Christianity than us and youse!

What you ought to do is find a Copt to talk to. You will find that they adhere to the same conception of authority in Christianity as Roman Catholics do, despite having been in schism for around about 1500 years. All the Eastern Churches share with Western Catholicism the conception of authority as lying in the chain of personal relationships that constitute the hierarchical bit of the One Holy Catholic Apostolic church. By holding to this Apostolic tradition, I think they have struck something like the right balance between the inflexibility of Islam and the ‘reed blowing in the wind’ mutability of Protestantism.

You will find that the Copt is pretty similar to a Catholic. I think I have written this somewhere here before, but when I heard a Coptic Priest speak when I was in Devil Bunny City I was struck by how much more Catholic he was after 1500 years of separation than Luther had been after five. Among other things, you will find the traditions of prayers for the dead and veneration for the Mother of God, which Luther dispensed with, going strong in the Coptic community.

A response to the First Comment of Nato on the Reformation

1. ‘The Reformation wasn't just about Luther. There were movements all over Europe (e.g. Switzerland, France, Scotland & England), with other key individuals all contributing to the movement (Zwingli, Calvin, Knox, Cramner, & Tyndale to name a few). While I deplore some of their unbiblical methods (don't get me started on Calvin), they all contributed in their own way to the movement as a whole.’

I realised that there is a clash of worldviews here.

A Protestant naturally believe that the Reformation was the restoration of something that once existed, so all the Reformers are labourers in the same garden, petals of the same flower, tentacles of the same octopus, etc., and it is silly to focus on Luther.

A Catholic, on the other hand, sees the Reformation as the irruption of something novel into Christendom that never existed before, and thus highly dependent in all its features on the character and emphases of the man who got it rolling and was the leading Reformer for the first two or three decades of the movement. From my point of view, the four ‘solas’ in your third point are historical accidents arising from Luther’s Augustinian background, and not the central axioms of Christianity.

2. ‘Luther translated the New Testament into German, but his intent was certainly not to divorce it from the entirety of Scripture. Luther's 39 articles were a reaction against the inherent corruption of the teachings of Christ that had built up over the centuries (e.g. Indulgences, Purgatory and Mary worship to name a couple).’

Everywhere in Luther’s writings you will find a very strong dichotomy between ‘Law’ and ‘Gospel’- i.e., between the Old Testament and the New Testament- with ‘Law’ playing the part of ‘scissors’ and ‘Gospel’ playing the part of ‘rock’. In this he stands solidly in the tradition of St. Augustine, St. Paul, and Christianity as a whole, so I am not intending to accuse him of anything untoward in separating the New and Old Testaments.

3. ‘The Reformation was based around a few key doctrinal issues (sometimes called the "Great Solas")Four that are key to this discussion are:
a) How can you be right with God?
By Grace Alone
(Sola Gratia)
b) How does this Grace Come?
By Christ Alone
(Solus Christus)
c) How do we find Christ?
Through Scripture Alone
(Sola Scriptura)
d) How are we 'saved'?
(jargon, I know, but scriptural
language so I'll use it)
By faith alone
(Sola Fide)’

Here’s an extract from something Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor wrote in the Spectator last month. I’ve been carrying it around in my pocket for a few days, so I should probably write it down before it gets washed:

I never hear the name of the Church without smiling at the mischievous remark of Karl Barth, the great 20th-century Swiss Calvinist theologian. For him, ‘Santa Maria sopra Minerva’ was a perfect description of what is wrong with Catholicism: it is founded, said Barth, upon ancient pagan wisdom (and not on the Gospel), is too accepting of insights which arise outside the confines of Christianity (because it is too positive about the presence of grace everywhere) and it makes too much of Mary (because it dares to think that human beings have the dignity to ‘co-operate’ with God throught the exercise of their freedom).
Now Barth was called by Pope Pius XII the greatest theologian since Thomas Aquinas, so we have to take him seriously; but if Barth says that these things are what is wrong with Catholicism, I think I could make a fair case for saying that these are precisely the things that are right about Catholicism. Our European Christian culture- there is such a thing and it is central to the character of Europe, and it is a misrepresentation to delete Christianity from Europe’s past, present, and future- draws upon streams of wisdom and philosophy from ancient Greece and Rome, and this is undoubtedly an enrichment. As a Catholic, I most certainly believe that grace is at work everywhere in God’s creation, and not only within the life of Christians, because God is creator of all and leaves marks of his presence in every culture. Finally, I hold that God’s approach to us, and to Mary whom he asks to become the mother of the Saviour, respects our freedom to choose and respond to him- God, after all, does not impose divine love upon us. When God comes to us in Christ, he is welcomed by Mary, the first of those to be saved by him.

4. ‘Sola Scriptura is not unscriptural: try
2 Timothy 3:16-17 & 2 Peter 1:16-21 + 3:13-16 New Testament) and Psalm 119 (Old Testament) for starters - I'm happy to unpack them a litte more another time.’

The problem is, if Christ has intended the Church to be guided by a book, he would have said so: this is something pretty important, after all. Thus your citations should be something like Matthew X1:y1-z1, Mark X2:y2-z2, Luke X3:y3-z3 and John X4:y4-z4 to be convincing. What he did say about what would happen after he left involved the sending of the ‘Comforter’ – who Muslims believe to be Muhammad, and Christians the Holy Spirit- and something ambiguous about Peter being given the keys to bind and loose.

From the Second Letter of St. Paul to Timothy, 3:16-17:

All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.

Saying all scripture is profitable is not at all the same thing as saying that only scripture is profitable.

From the Second Letter of St. Peter, 1:16-1:21

For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. For when He received honor and glory from God the Father, such an utterance as this was made to Him by the Majestic Glory, ‘This is My beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased’ and we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. So we have the prophetic word made more sure, to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts. But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

This seems to support the opposite point of view: ‘no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation’ implies that it is useless to read it without the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This quote also certainly does not equate all Scripture with prophecy, or imply that the men moved by the Holy Spirit to make prophecies were necessarily recorded accurately.

and 3:14-16:

But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells. So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

You could equally well say ‘ignorant and unstable people distort Ikea flat pack instructions, to their own destruction’: this does not imply ‘only Ikea flat pack instructions are useful in avoiding destruction.’

Are there two ways of numbering the Psalms? My Psalm 119 is very short and does not seem appropriate:

To the Lord in the hour of my distress I call and he answers me
‘O Lord, save my soul from lying lips, from the tongue of the deceitful.’
What shall he repay you in return, O treacherous tongue?
The warrior’s arrows sharpened and coals, red-hot, blazing.
Alas, that I abide a stranger in Meshech, dwell among the tents of Kedar!
Long enough have I been dwelling with those who hate peace.
I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for fighting.

Or, maybe it is appropriate...

Should you ever think that 'when you speak, I am for fighting', remember this nifty quote attributed to Leo Szilard: ‘A scientist's aim in a discussion with his colleagues is not to persuade, but to clarify.’ ;)

I’m having a wonderful time but I’d rather be whistling in the dark

This is just a mild plea to Nato to expand his comment point number 2 for me. :)

Without knowing the sources upon which you base your historical analysis of the Reformation, I find your conclusions regarding church history and authority (e.g. Luther divorcing the New Testament from the rest of the Bible and the 'infallibility' of the Bible to name two) to be at significant odds with my understanding of what I would call 'evangelicalism' (the driving spirit of the Reformation).

It’s not surprising that any of my conclusions regarding church history and authority are at significant odds with the Protestant understanding of the Reformation, since my premises regarding church history and authority are at significant odds with the Protestant understanding of the Reformation! As far as I know, attributing Luther’s (unscriptural) doctrine of ‘sola scriptura’ to the example of Islam is my own idea, though I may have picked it up from Belloc or another sabre-rattling Catholic apologist of yesteryear. I think if anyone really does believe in the ‘infallibility’ of the Bible, they are more than halfway to Islam if they are intellectually honest, because if they ever chance to pick up the Qur’an they will realise: ‘Whoa! So that’s how an infallible book should be written. This must be the One.’

Sources of Authority

The folly of calling for a reformation in Islam comparable with the ‘reformation’ in Christianity lies in the different sources of authority in the two religions.

In Islam, the source of authority is a single infallible book, which is considered by many Muslim scholars to predate the existence of the earth. This book explicitly claims to be infallible. It explicitly claims to be the direct word of God. It reiterates these claims often and at length. Any reformation of Islam must return to the Qur’an, which is fixed and immurable. The moving finger has written and moved on, and nothing can be changed. A Caliph has no authority to add anything to, or take anything from, what is written. His is primarily a political role, and he cannot chose to adapt Islam to suit changing conditions. It is as it is: take it or leave it. Even the tradition, or hadith, those few extra doctrines not found in the Qur’an- such as the idea that Muhammad was the last, the seal of the Prophets- is a closed canon, and has not been augmented for a thousand years.

If you were going to reform Islam, you could plausibly take a look at the Qur’an and make a serious effort to determine which suras might be supplanted by other ones. The logical way to do this would be to take the later, less-tolerant Medinan suras wherever they conflicted with the earlier, more-tolerant Meccan ones. I doubt this is what Janet Albrechtsen has in mind. This will result in a harder, fiercer, less flexible religion, which up to a point will be able to resist the modern world, but it will not be in any way a reformation which will allow Islam to adapt to the modern world.

Another thing you could do is reject the hadith, and go back to the Qur’an alone. In itself this is going to be an entirely negative reform. It can only become positive and adaptive if, in rejecting the un-Qur’anic idea of Muhammad as the seal of the Prophets, you allow a new Prophet to come in with additional teachings expanding on those of Muhammad. This is not a new idea. This is what the Druze did, and the Baha’i’s, and a number of other religions, all of which have in common the fact that through this reformation they are no longer Islam. This path will not result in a reformed Islam, simply in more daughters to join the family of Abrahamic religions.

In Christianity, the ultimate source of authority is a person. Historically, this has been understood to be mediated by an unbroken chain of personal contacts linking the hierarchical Church to the historical person called the Christ. This person never wrote a book, not commanded that any book be written about him. Many things were written about him and his teachings, nevertheless, and were collected by the Church, but these writings do not claim to be infallible, do not claim to be the direct word of God, and as they contradict each other in many places rely on the interpretation of the insititution which originally collected them. The hierarchical Church has historically claimed the power to bind and unbind: to preserve and defend a certain core of dogma, which may be extended from time to time, and to supplement it with a penumbra of disciplinary laws which can be, and are, changed from century to century to adapt to changing conditions.

Now, Christianity can and has been reformed in any number of ways, because reformation seeks to go back to the person who is the ultimate source of authority and express his will in a way which is suited to particular conditions. The hierarchical church is an intrinsically adaptive and reforming institution. On the scale of a human lifetime, it may seem as inflexible as Islam, but on a time scale of millennia you can see that it is alive.

Of course, if you want to have a ‘Martin Luther-style Reformation’, you want to reform Christianity by going outside the traditional means of mediating authority. You need to come up with something besides the hierarchical Church. Luther, having the example of Islam before him- Hungary was on the ropes, and the legions of the Sultan were marching towards the heart of Christendom- seized on the idea of a sacred book as a source of authority. Thus, he took the New Testament, a book far less suitable for such a purpose than the Qur’an or the Torah, and set it up as an infallible authority. This has been shown by events since to have been a dumb idea. Once extracted from its original context, the New Testament has given rise to a bewildering medley of sects that have almost nothing in common, because it does not have the properties of an infallible sacred book that the Qur’an has. It does not answer all the questions that need to be answered. Martin Luther’s ‘reformation’ was a catastrophe for Christendom that left us open for the cancer of moral relativism that has destroyed Western Civilisation in its ancient heartlands. But, I am getting off the track and indulging in gratuitous Prod-bashing. What is important is that it is not possible to do anything remotely analogous to what Luther did in Islam. You cannot extract anything other than the Qur’an as the ultimate source of authority without ceasing to be Islam.

There is only one way to reform Islam that I have thought of. There was once an institution somewhat analogous to the Papacy in its capacity to define and extend dogma, but it was not the Caliphate. It was the Imamate, as understood by the Shi’a, and it ceased to exist many centuries ago with the disappearance of the 12th Imam. Thus, if we truly want to reform Islam- not just open it up to the same postmodernist cancer that has infected Christendom- we need to do two things. We need to support the ascendancy of Shi’a over Sunni, like the United States has been inadvertently doing in Iraq, and we need to hope that the 12th Imam shows up soon.

Sometimes it's not worth scoring pedant points

I just composed this letter for El Pais de Murdoch, but decided it would serve no useful purpose:

I can see what Janet Albrechtsen is getting at with her call for a ‘Martin-Luther-style reformation’ of Islam. The Muslim world clearly needs another violent mass movement led by an anti-intellectual Jew-bashing demagogue.

The Madness of King James

I was a bit peeved, finding out that ‘contrarian’ is a term of abuse on RealClimate. I assumed it meant ‘someone with a bias towards the position which is roundly abused by the majority’, but it seems they mean by it ‘someone who disregards all the evidence out of contrariness.’

Nature is doing the experiment for us, so there is no need for me to dispute with the RealClimate people. And no appropriate dangling threads to grab hold of at the moment, either. But all these things keep going around and around in my head and keeping me awake, and I am hoping they will go away if I write them down, so you will have to bear with me. Or go somewhere else, until the next post. That would also be fine. I am afraid all my links are recorded at work, where I have been collecting them in epsiodes of slackness, so I can’t put them in now.

I contend that:

* People who post comments on RealClimate erring on the ‘we’ll all be rooned’ side are not slapped down, unlike those who post comments erring on the ‘she’ll be right’ side.

* People who argue on RealClimate about the difference between 0.08 and 0.11 degrees as if it means something, and attribute deviations in multi-decadal averages of that magnitude to specific reafforestation events, are not doing anything worthwhile. They are finding patterns in noise, just like any good animist tribesman. We can only make very broad, careful statements with data as noisy as we have.

* If my y = mx + c correlation, where y = deltaT and c = [CO2], curves up at the end, it must mean that something other than CO2 is primarily responsible for the last fifteen years. This might be falling aerosols, or the delayed effect of rising CFCs, or something else, but we can be certain that the real ‘m’ for forcing due to carbon dioxide is not as great as the ‘m’ we might extrapolate from looking at the last fifteen years alone.

* The forcings used by Hansen et al. in 1988, an apparently seminal paper to which I was directed by Eli Rabett, are just that same y = mx + c that a dumb ox like myself could have come up with.

* I have learned what I ought to have realised from Beer’s Law, that y = mx + c ought to be y = m log(x) + c. NB: This means that any correlation curve ought to be curving down, not up.

* None of the specific predictions of the Hansen et al. model seem to have come to pass: China, Central Asia, the margins of the Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves, and shallow seas like the Caribbean, don’t seem to have experienced more intense warming than other parts of the world over the past eighteen years.

* The argument that anthropic influences on water vapour can be ignored because water vapour has a short residence time in the atmosphere does not hold, er, water. Ozone has a short residence time, too. It is the steady state concentration, averaged over space and time, that is important, and I cannot imagine how this could not have been affected by human activities. I feel that anthropogenic water vapour will be far more significant than a 30% loading on the [CO2] forcing, and it will be much more complicated to work out.

* The arguments about the ocean heating up and outgassing carbon dioxide, and the ocean becoming acidic, ignore the fact that the ocean is a very thin warm bit on top of a very thick cold bit. It is the mixing of these bits that is important. I found some US Geological Survey data of ships sailing here, there, and everywhere and measuring the carbon dioxide concentration in the water. There was a very broad range in carbon dioxide concentrations. The concentration in the water was often higher than atmospheric concentration. There wasn’t any trend to less carbon dioxide in warmer water. Why is this? Well,

* When I was last in Devil Bunny City I went to a talk by a physical chemist from New Zealand who talked about how mass and heat transport are coupled: you can’t calculate the flux of carbon dioxide from water to atmosphere and vice versa just by looking at the concentrations, you need to know the relative temperatures too. I worked out his equations in Excel, and a gas will move against a pressure gradient if it is moving with a temperature gradient: i.e., if the air is hotter than the water, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the water will be higher than in the air. He wrote two papers on this in 1991-1992 in the climate scientists’ journal of record, Geophysical Research Letters. They have each been cited exactly four (4!) times. I found a paper from 2003 by a collection of climate scientist chaps from Princeton and other places, who estimated carbon uptake in various places and come to the conclusion: ‘there is more carbon dioxide uptake at low latitudes, and less at high latitudes, than the models predict.’ Well, this is because the physics in those models is wrong.

Now, I might be in error. I may not have read enough and may be overlooking lots of things. But everything I have found has reinforced my belief that it is very wrong to make drastic and expensive changes in policy on the basis of projections of existing climate change models. The models do not contain all of the relevant physics. The models do not have proven predictive value. Extrapolations of the models to the future, to give ‘we’ll all be rooned’ gleefully and credulously reported by the popular science media, is irresponsible evangelism, not science.

Here's another quote from Diarmaid MacCulloch's book about the Reformation, page 571:

Personally leading an investigation to discover the causes of the storms, James
uncovered a story of a gathering at North Berwick parish kirk the previous
Hallowe'en (31 October 1589) over which Devil himself had presided, with the
agenda of plotting the King's destruction, principally through manipulation of
the weather. The details were abundant, or at least became so after the suspects
had been subjected to prolonged torture.