Until the BBC iPlayer was released, there would have been no point in blogging about programmes which the reader would have no chance of watching again. But the iPlayer is available, and so too is the exemplary documentary I watched last night: Am I Normal? presented by psychologist Dr. Tanya Byron.

In the hour-long film - a sensible, grown-up film without patronising background music or silly graphics - she explored the fine line between religious devotion and psychiatric disorder. Why is it that Pentecostals who speak in tongues are considered blessed, but schizophrenics who hear voices are institutionalised? Why is it that we pass by the street evangelist, thinking him to be slightly weird, but consider the grey-haired Carmelite nun, silently passing time in a convent, to be harmless?

Byron - an atheist herself - was open-minded about the value of religious belief for some people (statistically, patients with a spiritual background are more likely to recover from psychiatric syndromes than are atheists). But she was quite prepared to damn the cult of faith healing, which lacks any substantial evidence base and which may raise false hope for patients with severe medical conditions best treated by mainstream physical interventions. She was respectful in pressing the values and beliefs of atheists (Matthew Parris) and believers (Jeremy Vine) alike. She witnessed an evangelical song meeting, noting the same symptoms of crowd arousal - raised arms, physical proximity - as occur at football matches and rock concerts. She was intrigued by a trained psychiatrist who treated patients by exorcising the dead child spirits by whom they were possessed, seemingly (though no hard data is available) with results akin to those achieved by therapies such as CBT. Byron examined the neuroscience of talking in tongues (neurotheology). This has shown how the neurological system that regulates semantic language does shut down when people are being "possessed" as mediums for the "spirit," proving that they are not deliberate fakes, though it does not (cannot) prove either way the mechanism by which the synaptic action happens in the first place, whether supernaturally Holy or a self-induced behaviour.

This serious and sensitive look at what could have been a greatly divisive issue ought to be well-received by religious believers, atheists and scientists. It did not make grand claims to prove or disprove the existence of God, or to castigate religion as anti-science (though this was implicitly there in the background, in the consistent lack of an evidence base for alternative therapies and faith healing). Rather, it stuck to its remit to expose the conventions by which "normal" is determined, and it concluded with some force that what we classify as psychologically normal - and the normal therapies deployed to treat psychiatric disorders - are generally socially-constructed ideologies.

Because of this, many of the conventions and methods between treatments may be comparable at root. I noted that the psychiatrist-exorcist asked many questions of his patient whilst rhetorically planting ideas; a similar sort of approach is used by mainstream therapy or even by the Eliza chatbot (the latter, a simple artificial intelligence programme, is peculiarly effective at helping interlocutors to express their anxieties). It seems that treating patients with psychological problems may be done effectively through talking with God, inner demons, keyboards, doctors or priests. The challenge science and religion must meet now is to confront the evidence: even if normal and mad are arbitrary categories, there must be one form of treatment that is most effective, for most people, most of the time. One suspects the scientists may be very prepared to explore this. The priests, less so. But with the likes of Tanya Byron moderating, there may be hopes for a start.

Labels: Am I Normal?, religion, Science and Culture, Tanya Byron

Like a good old Roman bloodbath, there's something spectacular in seeing the seasoned intellectual warriors Terry Eagleton and Richard Dawkins, respectively the United Kingdom's best-known literary theorist and scientist, scrapping in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. Reviewing Dawkins' The God Delusion, Eagleton accuses him of being "theologically illiterate," of producing a "vulgar caricature of religious faith," of "lunging, flailing, mispunching." Anyone who thinks academia is dull, dispassionate and impersonal should think again.

Not having read The God Delusion, I can only comment from the sidelines on this debate, and on Eagleton's review in particular. Eagleton has spent the last forty years exposing the materialist ideology that underlies culture, and so it is surprising that he does not really ask why Dawkins has felt the need to publish the book in the first place. If as Eagleton says "professional atheists" are "the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe there is anything there to be understood," why would Dawkins jump into the melee so unprepared?

In A.S. Byatt's (yes, her again!) Virgin in the Garden quadrilogy, a grumpy, atheist English teacher, Bill Potter, sermonises to his family about the contradictory and placatory myth-making of Christianity. He is enraged and alienated when his daughter marries a clergyman in the second book. But he is equally angry in the fourth when he discovers that his grandchildren are not taught the Bible at school. How, he blusters, can one expect to understand and appreciate Paradise Lost without first knowing Genesis. This is the curious position most atheistic or agnostic literary intellectuals find themselves in. Unable or unwilling to believe in God, we read "in the beginning was the Word" quite literally, for without the Word our culture of literary words would not have assumed the wonderfully multiple shape it has.

Eagleton, a Catholic, points this out to Dawkins. But Dawkins knows and appreciates his literary canon as well (I remember his wonderful readings from Keats at the lecture I attended last year), and he too cannot have failed to notice the centrality of Christianity to it. Even if he adopts the uncompromisingly atheistic position of Bill Potter, he should, like him, surely see the significance of faith. That he apparently does not acknowledge this in his new book suggests that he is fighting so wildly because he has been backed into such a tight corner, and is unable to give an inch of ground.

The majority of Eagleton's essay is a corrective explanation of what Christianity is actually about (in this, he slyly slips his voice, so it is hard to recognise whether he is simply retelling the story as history, or making a statement of personal faith). He concerns himself by studying how religious belief might be alien to science, but he is too brief in his consideration of the reciprocal relationship of how science might be alien to religion, from which Dawkins' argument springs. When he does glance at Dawkins' motives, Eagleton says that The God Delusion arises from "a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste." But when Robert Hooke, perhaps the greatest of the early English empiricists, looked down his new microscrope at the eye of the common fly, he did not see himself as reducing the mystery of God's creation but elevating it, seeing in the thousand elements that constitute the eye the range of minute interventions of God in the natural world. Even after Darwin, there is surely (as Darwin writes in that glorious closing paragraph of The Origin of Species), a greater grandeur in the view of life as continuously evolving under elegantly simple laws, whether these have their origin in a volcanic vent or a being beyond the stars. No, there is no reason why common sense empiricism should lead automatically to a divide from religion.

And, as Eagleton notes, Dawkin's rigid empirical principles apparently desert him as he fails to ask why so many millions of people do hold a genuine belief in God. Even if belief has its foundations in the neurological structures of the brain, as a mechanism for survival, it is definitively in the world, as well as, so believers say, transcendent from it. Why does Dawkins deny even this? There must be another, deeper reason why Dawkins has written this book, at this moment, with such paradoxical ferocity, other than the old "two cultures" schism. From my personal experience, I see something of where Dawkins is coming from. For an agnostic like myself, in spite of my Bill Potter-like appreciation of religion as a textual artefact, I now feel under pressure to reject theology entirely. In the light of conflict in the Middle-East, knowing the brutality of Catholicism in allowing AIDs and dogma to spread in Africa in equal measure, in my fear of the grip evangelicals are exerting on objective knowledge, I cannot help but want to react, as Dawkins has done, by taking a swipe at the systematic whole, even if it means destroying the parts I appreciate for their literary import.

Although F.R. Leavis would disagree with me on this one, literary criticism has less potential than science to improve the world. It is neither literature nor religion which will develop drugs for AIDs (although neither of these things developed the weapons used in the Middle East either). Dawkins, then, must be feeling the heat of religion even more than I do. As he commented to Edge, the "tactically, politically savvy" thing to do would be to occupy the middle of the road between religion and science. His failure to do this has ensured that he has

come in for a lot of criticism from some of my scientific colleagues because...they feel that I'm rocking the boat and, as it were, giving aid and comfort to the creationists. And I think in a way they might have a point because I have heard that some creationists love to quote people like me because it lends weight to their claim that if you are an evolutionist that means that you have to be an atheist.

However, Dawkins continues

I'm concerned with what's true. For me the evolution/creation war is really just a battle. It's a skirmish in a larger war between supernaturalism and naturalism, and I don't think that I'm prepared to compromise on what I think is true in order to win a tactical battle in a skirmish in what I see as a larger war.

I do not agree with Dawkins' tactics. As with all wars, it generates martyrs rather than winning hearts and minds. Like all bad strategies (military or intellectual) it lacks a plan for exit by which one can give ground, gracefully, when the war is at last being won. But the thing that most interests me is that Dawkins knows this. The God Delusion does not spring, as Eagleton suggests it does, primarily from an ignorance of religion but from a fear of it, an anxiety that is fully self-conscious. The God Delusion may not tread lightly in the centre ground of the debate, but it certainly helps to show how extensively that debate has become polarised. The war promises to be long and brutal. At least the punches between Eagleton and Dawkins are going to be confined to the the letters pages of the LRB, and not the back alleys of Baghdad or the classrooms of our schools.

Labels: religion, Richard Dawkins, Science and Culture, Terry Eagleton, The God Delusion