Religious broadcasting appears to have hit a new low: Channel 4 have managed to produce an ostensibly religious programme that actually features nothing about faith or belief whatsoever. In the ultimate demonstration of consumer-centric spirituality, the programme manages to completely divorce spiritual practise from spiritual belief and therefore robs the practises featured of any sort of meaning – Christianity being represented by giving up hair straighteners for a month? Give me a break.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t have any issues with people exploring different beliefs and practises – but to take these practises out of their context is pointless, meaningless and almost insulting to the people who do take part in these practises as a genuine outworking of their faith, rather than simply as an attempt at some sort of spiritual quick-fix.

All this is thrown into even sharper relief by the recent BBC programme, The Monastery. Billed as a sort of spiritual Big Brother (except without evictions), this put a disparate group of men with a wide range of spiritual beliefs in a monastery for a month, as a sort of experiment to determine whether monastic life was still relevant to ordinary people even today. The answer, as it turned out, was a resounding yes – none of the guys came out as raving fundamentalist Catholics, but they were all affected by the experience and spoke genuinely and warmly about the way the time there had changed them and helped them learn about themselves. The testimonials at the end of the programme were honest, heartfelt and often profound.

The testimonials at the end of Spirituality Shopper, by contrast, centred around vague, fluffy sentiments and sounded contrived and somewhat forced – the biggest change in the girl’s life seemed to be that she’d realised she didn’t need to use her hair straighteners every day.

Well, whoop-de-fricking-doo.

I don’t know whether to laugh out loud at the sheer idiocy of it all, or to weep that these sick bigots are (ab)using God and Christianity to push forward their disgusting right-wing, racist agendas.

Talisker rocks

Goddamnit, Coldplay annoy me. They give me every reason to hate them, and they go and produce consistently great, glorious, majestic albums full of wonderful anthemic rock songs. How am I suppose to maintain my self-satisfied sense of indie superiority if I like Coldplay, hmm?

Went out with a bunch of guys for Richard‘s birthday last night. We ended up, unsurprisingly, debating theology in the beer garden of Hardy’s Well. It amused me greatly that one of the girls there considered Richard to be a liberal, so goodness only knows what that makes me. The both of us got accused of blaspheming for contending that the Bible wasn’t inerrant. By a spooky coincidence, Sven today has a post regarding a sermon by the wonderful and very, very clever N T Wright on exactly that subject, from which I can only conclude that that Bishop of Durham must also be a blasphemer (to say nothing of the fact that he’s also friends with that low-down dirty liberal, Archbishop Rowan Williams). So, all things considered, quite a good night.

Princeton have announced the winners of the inaugural Art of Science competition. It’s a fascinating collection of beautiful, bizarre and fascinating imagery; somewhat strangely, some of the most visually satisfying and intruiging images are those produced in the process of “real” research, whereas some of the created, designed images seem a little, well, dull.

Anyway, this set me off thinking about a conversation I had nearly a year ago. I was walking back from the pub with a friend, and we got to talking about the idea of “satisfying” or “beautiful” proofs in maths and science: the fact that it always feels much better, as a scientist, if your results show a simple, elegant result, as opposed to a complex, chaotic one; or if a mathematical proof can be reduced to two beautiful lines of logic, rather than several thousand pages of dense formulae: many mathematicians would love to believe that the real, elegant, simple proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem is still waiting to be discovered. Similarly, the proof for the four colour theorem is unsatisfying as it required a computer to mechanically crunch through 1,500 potential arrangements in order to prove it, which is neither simple nor elegant.

The thing is, if we’re being utterly rational about this (and neglecting, for the moment, the idea of a Creator), why should we have any expectation at all that things should be ordered, simple, beautiful, or elegant? We have an inbuilt tendency, as humans, to prefer order, structure and abstraction in our world, but there isn’t a rational reason to suppose that the world should reflect this: indeed, quantum physics would suggest that, in fact, the universe is (at a fundamental level, anyway) unpredictable and random – yet we persist in looking for order in it.

Paul Erdos jokingly talked about proofs as being “From The Book” – that is, there’s this giant book, written by God (in whom he did not believe), containing all the most elegant, simple and beautiful proofs in mathematics, and so when someone comes up with a simple, elegant proof (for example, the proof that the square root of 2 is irrational), it is often referred to as being “one from the book”.

As someone who does believe in some form of Creator (although one who is open to arguments about exactly how he went about doing the Creating), I guess it comes down to a faith, in my part, that the Creator was good enough to creat a Universe was that was ultimately knowable (see Richard, I have been reading that Torrance book) – but why should this be the case for my rationalist, atheist friend who doesn’t believe in such a Creator? I guess the idea that the Universe is fundmentally unknowable is such a dispiriting notion that one is compelled to ignore it: maybe I should just ask her, rather than just musing about it here…

Whatever. In my googling around for this post, I came across a tribute to Paul Erdos entitled Proofs From The Book, which looks fascinating and has been added to my list of books I really should read at some point. Plus, it’s my birthday on the 12th, hint hint 🙂