It’s a common question, and I’m not going to give a comprehensive answer here and now. This post is about one small aspect of the issue.

There’s a phenomenally important book by Robert Axelrod, based on an earlier article of the same name, called The Evolution of Cooperation. This book comes up in pretty much every discussion of evolutionary morals, and just about every atheist blogger on the web has reviewed, summarised or referenced it at some stage, so I’ll just give a really brief overview of it. The basic point is that, in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma between members of a population, under certain conditions the most stable strategy is “tit for tat” – you cooperate on the first round, then in subsequent rounds you do whatever the other player did the round before. A fairly small group of players following this strategy can quickly take over a much larger population of players who always defect.

The real-world translation is that, in a population where you often interact with the same members (say, human society), it’s in your own interests to act for the good of others, even when it can potentially disadvantage you – but only as long as they return the favour. If someone responds to your generosity by turning on you, it’s in your interests to avoid helping them in future. You should, however, be willing to forgive them if they change their ways. Basically, you should be nice to people you’ve just met, and from then on you should treat them the way you remember them treating you recently. A similar concept in biology is called reciprocal altruism.

The nice thing about this is that it clicks so well with our (or at least, my) intuitive social sense – it feels natural to behave like this. It’s quite easy to believe that we’ve evolved towards stable, mutually beneficial behaviour. If that’s the case, then we have a basis for morals that make perfect sense without an external Giver of the Law.

Buuut, but but but. The former Christian in me rarely shuts up during discussions like this, and at the moment wants to point out that Christian morals go beyond this. Jesus had this to say:

But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them. Luke 6:27-31, ESV

It seems Christian morality includes something that can’t be derived from rational self-interest. The stable “tit for tat” strategy says that you should cooperate only with people who cooperate with you. Jesus says to cooperate with everyone, regardless of their behaviour. In Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma terms, this is the (sensibly named) “Always Cooperate” strategy. A player using this strategy tends to get exploited – in fact, it’s the worst possible strategy to use in a population of defecting players.

So do Christians know something we don’t? Are Jesus’ moral teachings something that we can’t derive from first principles, that have to be taught to us from someone outside? Are Christian ethics genuinely superior to our natural altruistic instincts?

If you guessed that my answer is “no”, you know me too well, but knowing why is a different story.

The first thing I should mention is that “turn the other cheek” is high on the list of least-observed commandments in Christianity, at least in western society. Some Christians (and churches) go so far as to say that these verses are hyperbole, and not to be taken literally. Some readily confess that they “fall short” of Jesus’ standard in this area. Others just gloss over it. Certainly there are a select few people who have lived up to it, but I must admit I haven’t met any of them. For the most part, if someone takes away your cloak, you call the police and do whatever you can to stop them taking your tunic.

(In the time since I originally wrote that paragraph, someone pointed me at an interesting theory that Jesus’ comments along those lines weren’t as altruistic as they appear. Interesting.)

The point is that, whatever they say in theory, in practice Christians don’t think it’s a good idea to cooperate with someone who’s trying to exploit you. Maybe I could be accused here of taking aim at the fallible humans rather than the godly ideal to which they aspire. However, I’d say that it’s not that the reciprocal altruism embedded in our human instincts is holding us back from God’s ideal plan; it’s that our instincts are quite rightly telling us that God’s plan is wrong. Whether they admit it or not, Christians have realised that the godly ideal is flawed at this point. Unconditional generosity is not a path to a better society.

I think there’s something more to it though – something that explains why people would accept a moral system like this in the first place, even in theory. Take this passage from Proverbs, for example:

If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat,
and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink,
for you will heap burning coals on his head,
and the LORD will reward you. Proverbs 25:21-22, ESV

The sentiment in the first part is noble, if (as I’ve discussed earlier) impractical to live up to. But does anyone else find the second part of that a bit jarring? It’s as though it’s saying that being nice to your enemy is just a roundabout way of attacking them.

At first glance, “burning coals” might refer to inducing guilt or something – it’s not totally clear. Paul quotes the passage in Romans and adds his own interpretation:

Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary,

“if your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink;
for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.”

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Romans 12:17-21, ESV

Again, there’s a germ of a noble sentiment here, but it’s marred by the “burning coals” business. But the bit that sheds some more light here is the command to “leave it to the wrath of God”. This seems to be saying that you should treat your enemies well, not because revenge is inherently bad, but because revenge is God’s job, and he can do it better than you ever could. To Paul, the “burning coals” are cast down on your enemies from heaven.

This is where, in my opinion, the Christian “turn the other cheek” sentiment reverts to “tit for tat”. As I said earlier, few Christians manage it in practice; but those even those who do are assured that their enemies will still be punished. Basically, they’re getting out of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game by relying on another player to (heavily) punish their enemies, while they give the appearance of cooperating.

If you squint just right, this is actually a pretty cool trick. Christianity has (unwittingly, unless you’re the conspiracy theory type) set up a system for people to be nice to each other, even when they don’t think it’s merited, because they’re confident that justice will be doled out in the end. The bit that almost impresses me is that this works even if the justice never happens, because the ultimate punishment is assumed to come after death, where (conveniently) no one can report back whether it happened.

When I say that I’m almost impressed, what I mean is that this encourages (in theory) niceness and generosity in a way that doesn’t upset our natural need for justice; but that doesn’t make it a better moral system. The strategy is still “Always Cooperate”, it’s just that the players don’t think it is. And it has the same vulnerability – if someone comes along who decides to exploit everyone’s niceness, they’ll get away with it. Everyone else will turn a blind eye, believing that, if what they’re doing is really wrong, then God will put a stop to it. Society will be worse off as a result.

Whether this has ever happened in a Christian society is left as an exercise to the reader.

So my point in all this is that there’s at least a starting point for morality without a god, which holds its own against Christian morality, even though the latter sells itself as more “noble” in the surface. This isn’t the end of the story by a long stretch, and yes, I know other people have explored this area much more thoroughly. But this is the beginning of my take on it.

Videos were taken and reactions were recorded, but we won’t be making them available just yet. I might put some isolated thoughts down on (virtual) paper before then. There’s a good chance we’ll do it again, so it might have to wait until the whole lot gets edited together.

Quick spoiler: I haven’t changed my mind about anything.

Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world’s 77 million Anglicans, faced calls to resign for suggesting the introduction in Britain of some aspects of Islamic law was unavoidable.

The Archbishop of Canterbury tried to quell the storm by denying he had called for Islamic law, known as sharia, to be introduced alongside British law.

In a BBC interview on Thursday, he referred to the use of sharia in some personal or domestic issues, much like orthodox Jews already have their own courts for some matters. Asked if sharia needed to be applied in some cases for community cohesion, Williams said: “It seems unavoidable.”

Hmm.

Archbish Williams has made an appearance on this blog before, when he cast doubt on the factual accuracy of the Christmas story. And, once again, I have mixed feelings.

First things first. I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel recently, and the negative effect of the practice of Islamic law in refugee communities in the Netherlands is fresh in my mind. Plus, I think that religions in general have a pretty bad track record of defining laws that promote rights and equality, so I don’t see why any religion should have claim to any privileged position to influence law.

However, while I disagree with Williams, there’s a big fat gulf between what he’s saying and people calling for him to resign. Here are a couple of excerpts from the full transcript of the interview (I recommend reading the whole thing):

What a lot of Muslim scholars would say, I think, and I’m no expert on this, is that Sharia is a method rather than a code of law and that where it’s codified in some of the ways that you’ve mentioned in very brutal and inhuman and unjust ways, that’s one particular expression of it which is historically conditioned, not at all what people would want to see as part of the method of trying to make actual the will of God in certain circumstances. So there’s a lot of internal debate within the Islamic community generally about the nature of Sharia and its extent; nobody in their right mind I think would want to see in this country a kind of inhumanity that sometimes appears to be associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well.

…

It’s very important [t]hat you mention there the word ‘choice’; I think it would be quite wrong to say that we could ever licence so to speak a system of law for some community which gave people no right of appeal, no way of exercising the rights that are guaranteed to them as citizens in general…

…

…as I said earlier, it’s not something that’s absolutely peculiar to Islam. We have orthodox Jewish courts operating in this country legally and in a regulated way because there are modes of dispute resolution and customary provisions which apply there in the light of Talmud. It’s not a new problem, not to mention the issues as I mentioned earlier the questions about how the consciences of Catholics Anglicans and others who have difficulty over issues like abortion are accommodated within the Law; so the whole idea that there are perfectly proper ways in which the law of the land pays respect to custom and community; that’s already there.

…

…now that principle that there’s one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it’s a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and the law needs to take some account of that, so an approach to law which simply said, ‘There is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or your allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts’. I think that’s a bit of a danger.

It seems pretty clear that he’s not proposing that the UK set up Islamic ghettos where western law doesn’t apply, which is how it seems to come across in the sound-bite news reports. It’s more like he’s saying that there could be a way, in communities that already internally follow a set of de facto religious laws, to allow that to influence civil law, without overriding anyone’s basic legal rights. Apparently this is already the case with Jewish communities. And he falls short of saying that this should happen; he mostly just says that it should be up for discussion.

I hardly see how people can be calling for his head on a plate over this.

The thing that stands out to me is that the head of the Anglican Church is taking a very big step back and talking about acceptance of standards outside his own religion. It’s almost as if he’s suggesting – shock, horror – that someone else might have a different point of view. He’s very non-partisan about the whole thing – he only talks about the Christian position in passing, by way of comparison; and he ducks the interviewer’s final question:

In the end, do you think that some people might be surprised to hear that a Christian Archbishop is calling for greater consideration of the role of Islamic law?

People may be surprised but I hope that that surprise will be modified when they think about the general question of how the law and religious community, religious principle are best and fruitfully accommodated…

Well, I am surprised. Pleasantly.

Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe people want the head of their church to push for the church’s beliefs and only the church’s beliefs. Maybe people are uncomfortable with the idea that their church’s leader is willing to consider that other people believe differently, and have just as much right to do so.

What jogged my memory about this was a list of the “top fifty” atheist aphorisms, according to some random email (via Friendly Atheist). There are some funny ones there, but check out number 8:

8. If There is No God, Then What Makes the Next Kleenex Pop Up?

According to ThinkExist, it’s a quote from Art Hoppe, a “popular columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle for more than 40 years [who] was known for satirical and allegorical columns that skewered the self-important.” That kinda fits.

Obviously whoever put the billboard up wasn’t being completely serious – or at least, I really hope they weren’t. But I’d love to know by what path the same phrase managed to end up on an Anglican billboard and a list of atheist sayings.

In particular – and again, assuming whoever was in charge of the billboard wasn’t totally serious – I’d like to know how they managed to appreciate the irony of the comment enough to present it to the public, but not enough to wonder what they’re doing in church in the first place. Maybe they have moderate beliefs about the level of God’s intervention in the world, and are taking a swipe at people who pray for parking spaces.

Or, they missed the irony altogether, in which case this is a real howler.

Or maybe they were trying to provoke thought and discussion. In which case they succeeded, ’cause I’ve spent the last half hour trying to unravel this.

…including how a star rose high in the sky and stood still to guide the wise men to Jesus’s birth place.

Stars simply don’t behave like that, he told the BBC during an interview.

Dr Williams said there was little evidence that the three wise men had existed at all. Certainly there was nothing to prove they were kings.

…

He went on to say that while he believed in it himself, new Christians need not leap over the “hurdle” of belief in the virgin birth before they could join the church.

He said the virgin birth was “part of what I have inherited”.

And on the timing of Jesus’s birth, he said the son of God was likely not born in December at all.

“Christmas was when it was because it fitted well with the winter festival,” he said.

This is kind of cool on the surface. The virgin birth is one of the obstacles (roadsigns?) I encountered during my deconversion, with the controversy around the translation of Isaiah 7:14. And he’s right that there just isn’t a lot of historical support for the story as described in the gospels.

But Dr Williams said almost everyone agreed on two things – that Jesus’s mother was named Mary and his father Joseph.

The archbishop said his approach was to stick strictly to what the Bible says.

But I have to interject with some minor concerns. Maybe there was a journalistic snafu here, but how is what he’s said so far “strictly… what the Bible says”? Wasn’t he just talking about how some of what the Bible says is probably a myth?

It sounds suspiciously like he’s trying to have a bet both ways. I’m not an all-or-nothing Biblical literalist (although if I was, I’d be in the “nothing” camp ), but it has to be said that once you start poking holes in the Bible’s credibility, the basis for a lot of Christianity starts to fall apart. Jesus’ resurrection, for example, is such an outlandish claim that I can’t see how you could take it seriously at all if your only source is a book that you’ve admitted is shaky in other places.

Ugh. Maybe I’m too much of an ex-fundamentalist. I know there are people who don’t see Christianity in those black-and-white terms. But I don’t see what else would convince you that it makes any sense. And I suspect that what Dr Williams is doing here (intentionally or otherwise) is inoculating Anglicans against the shakiness of the rest of the Bible. It seems like he’s saying “Sure, there’s some weird stuff in there, and some of it’s probably wrong, but don’t let that worry you that any of the important stuff is wrong. It’s okay to question some bits and still have unshakable faith that Christianity is still fundamentally right. Look at me, I do it every day.”

Can someone explain to me how you can doubt the accuracy of the Bible and still believe in, say, the resurrection, or Jesus’ miracles, or… whatever you do believe in that is still identifiably Christian? I know I’ve asked this before, but I’m doing it again, ’cause I’m thick and I still don’t get it.