The Roots of England's Riotous Rage
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When riots and looting erupted in major English cities last month, James Arthur was, like most of the English, shocked. But he wasn’t surprised.
That’s in part because Arthur, dean of the education college at the University of Birmingham, led a research team that produced a 2009 report on the crisis of character among England’s underclass teenagers. The report, produced as part of the John Templeton Foundation-funded Learning For Life UK program, warned that many English teenagers living in urban deprivation were disconnected from both their communities and basic morality. As the Templeton Report disclosed two years ago, Arthur and his colleagues presented the findings at No. 10 Downing Street, and the report received a great deal of attention in Parliament.
In the aftermath of this summer’s violence, Arthur’s work may well draw a lot more scrutiny from British leaders. The very demographic groups Arthur’s team identified as most at risk—white and black urban underclass teenagers—turned up at the forefront of the violence.
“When I did my research in schools across England, we discovered that it was precisely many of these disadvantaged white children and Afro-Caribbean black children that had the least respect for the basic virtues in civil society—and these were the groups that mainly rioted,” Arthur told TR recently.
Not all underclass English youth are in such dire moral circumstances. Arthur found that Muslim teenagers who shared the material poverty of their white and black neighbors nevertheless were far more educated in the virtues and faithful to civil society’s values.
“[W]hat they have is family stability. They also have religion to back them up. They have clear family values,” he explained.
By contrast, the white and black youth the Arthur study examined were far more likely to come from broken or dysfunctional families, and to have little or no religion at all. This too is not surprising to Arthur, who said that the rapid secularization of Britain, along with a post-1960s ethos that focuses more on rights than duties, has caused young Britons to lose touch with their moral traditions.
“No government or other secular tradition, has been able so far to replace the Judeo-Christian moral tradition,” Arthur said.
This is not merely a problem confined to the poor, Arthur insisted. The wealthy and the middle classes are also infected with a sense of privilege, and disdain sacrificing their own wants for the greater good of the commons, or anything else. Look, he said, at the way British politicians, bankers, journalists, and celebrities behave.
“Young people see this and think it is the norm,” Arthur added.
The Birmingham scholar has advised the British government in the past on its social policy, and expects to be called to do so again as authorities attempt to address the causes that led to the violence. A grim Arthur declared that we may have entered “a new moral Dark Age,” driven in part by the loss of faith in transcendent values and the decline in authority among society’s institutions. This is not, he fears, only a British problem.
“I fear that most of America is only 20 to 30 years behind us,” he said. “And I don’t believe we’ve seen the end of this. These young people have done it once, and I think they’ll do it again.”
(A full transcript of TR’s interview with James Arthur can be found here.)
Were Adam and Eve Real?
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Evangelicals and Reformed Christians are having an intense debate among themselves about whether or not Adam and Eve were historical figures or mythological personages. Belief in a literal Adam and Eve as the primal parents of humankind used to be fundamental to conservative Protestant theology. But now National Public Radio reports that some conservative Evangelical scholars are saying that genetics makes the historical Adam and Eve no longer tenable.
“That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years,” said Dennis Venema, a Trinity Western University biologist and senior fellow at BioLogos, a Templeton-funded organization promoting the science-religion dialogue.
Karl Giberson, a Christian physicist and a past leader at BioLogos, says that questions surrounding evolution and the origins of humankind are leading to a “Galileo moment” for Evangelicals. “When you ignore science, you end up with egg on your face,” Giberson told NPR. “The Catholic Church has had an awful lot of egg on its face for centuries because of Galileo. And Protestants would do very well to look at that and to learn from it.”
But Catholics aren’t out of the water. Though the Roman Catholic Church accepts evolution, science writer and 2010 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism fellow John Farrell tells his Forbes readers that Catholics are obliged to believe that the entire human race is descended biologically from Adam and Eve (“monogenism”), because that is how original sin was transmitted.
Writes Farrell: “Catholic apologists who point to Pope John Paul II’s 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences as evidence of the Church’s acceptance of evolution often fail to notice that the late Pope completely passed over the question of monogenism, and indeed never did discuss the problem that genetics poses to the doctrine.”
The Weak Case for the Multiverse
In the past decade, many scientists have come to believe that ours is only one of many universes, and that the laws of physics may be different in each one. If this “multiverse” theory is correct, it would appear to resolve many fundamental issues about the nature of existence.
Or would it? In the cover story of the August issue of Scientific American, the eminent cosmologist and 2004 Templeton Prize winner George F.R. Ellis argues that the case for the multiverse is “inconclusive.” For one thing, he writes, the multiverse hypothesis can never be tested empirically. For another, even if it were validated, the multiverse still would leave basic metaphysical questions unanswered.
“Nothing is wrong with scientifically based philosophical speculation, which is what multiverse proposals are,” Ellis writes. “But we should name it for what it is.”
Philosophers vs. Neuroscientists
Many neuroscientists believe free will is an illusion—and that they are on track to prove it. But a new report in Nature (September 1) highlights efforts by philosophers to convince these scientists to re-think their approach. The science journal spotlights a four-year, $4.4 million research program called Big Questions in Free Will, which seeks to integrate scientific and philosophical approaches to the perennial problem. Florida State University philosopher Al Mele, who directs the Templeton-funded initiative (see Templeton Report, 6/23/10) tells the journal that neuroscientists may not fully understand the nature of the problem they're working on.
"Part of what's driving some of these conclusions is the thought that free will has to be spiritual or involve souls or something," says Mele, who explains that many philosophers working on free will don't think in those categories.
A key goal of the Big Questions in Free Will project is to bring together philosophers and neuroscientists, who often talk past each other—if they talk to each other at all. Says Mele, "I think if we do a new generation of studies with better design, we'll get better evidence about what goes on in the brain when people make decisions."
