John Lloyd

Two clever men, long past the first flush of youth, took part in a debate on God’s place — or absence — in the meaning and origin of life last week in Oxford. They differed; and to no one’s surprise, each remained unconvinced by the other’s argument at its end. Oxford University has been hosting such encounters for centuries.

So why was the University’s Sheldonian Theatre packed, with two other theaters full of people watching the debate on closed-circuit screens? Why was it covered by the news media? Why had it been sold out within hours? Who still cared about this stuff in a society that — for all that the Church of England is an established religion and the queen is its head — is as secular as any in the democratic world?

Judging by the response of the audience, including this writer, that last question’s answer emerged in the Oxford debate. We realized, as we listened to the moderate, educated English cadences of the debaters, that we care because no matter how indifferent to religion we are, or even how certain that it is a purely human construct rather than a divine revelation, we are made uneasy by its claims and miss its promise of grace and eternity. More practically, we care because many can feel morally adrift without its guidance. In his just-published book, Religion for Atheists, the philosopher Alain de Botton argues that, as he put it in an interview, “religions are full of interesting, challenging, consoling ideas … they do community really well, they’re very good on ethics, they teach us to be good, to be kind.

And the fact that the Oxford debate was a clash, with the promise of a victor, added to the fascination of the event. One of the two debaters was Richard Dawkins, a fellow of Oxford’s New College, a famed biologist, yet more famed for being the world’s most prominent and aggressive atheist. The other was Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, head of the world Anglican communion, thought to number some 80 million. The stakes were high for both men –neither wanted to be seen as being bested. And for the audience, among whom were many priests and students of theology, to see a winner or loser was to offer reassurance that their faith, or lack of it, had support at the highest level available.

The title was “The Nature of Human Beings and the Question of Their Ultimate Origin” – as the chairman, the philosopher Anthony Kenny, remarked, more than enough to fill an evening. The evening was filled, to overflowing, intellectually and in attendance, but for much of the time it was even more replete with courtesies and agreement, a tone underscored by Kenny’s insistence that, first, both agree on three underpinning issues. These were: that they both believed there was such a thing as truth; that they believed in logic (as in, two contradictory statements cannot both be true); and that they believed in science’s claims to describe the observable world. Both agreed. And like well-tempered chess players, once agreed on the rules they then played the game with grace and humor.

They agreed on more than Kenny’s rules. Williams, probably the most brilliant mind ever to wear the archbishop’s mitre, showed himself versed enough in evolutionary biology, in analytical philosophy and in neuroscience to maintain a conversation with Dawkins on his own ground. Confident enough, too, to concede that the story of evolution as unfolded by Charles Darwin a century and a half before was established fact, and that Christianity — or at least his understanding of it — gained nothing from its denial.

The flash of fire in the debate, which came well into its second half, was when Dawkins pressed his advantage on just this point. Why was the beauty of Darwin’s insight, and all the advances in understanding the body and the mind that have flowed from it, not enough for Williams? Why “clutter the thing up” with talk of God?

Because, said Williams, the fact that we are conscious beings allows us to comprehend God. For Dawkins, consciousness is something that, to be sure, we don’t yet understand — but neuroscience will probably give us the answer soon enough. But for Williams, consciousness is not just what may set us apart from animals. It both makes us distinctively human — and allows us to join our consciousness with “an unconditional creative energy” that he calls God. For well over an hour, Williams could have been a formidably learned man debating with an expert; suddenly, he was a priest as well.

An “unconditional creative energy”: the nearest Williams came to a definition of the divine, which Dawkins did not challenge. Dawkins did, however, ask, more sharply than he had before: When did this relationship between man and the divine begin? When the first humanoids walked? When they talked? Was this God-energy around before the first humanoids, waiting for them to be fit to respond to Him? Well, said Williams, I think there has to be a point in the evolutionary process where the proto-human is aware of an address from God. I think, he continued, that there was a moment when Homo sapiens was both aware of himself and aware of the divine.

But, said Dawkins, moving in for a check, if not a checkmate, is not the world tragic? Look at the amount of suffering there is. Kenny, turning in his moderator’s chair to Williams on his left, said: That is much more of a problem for you. Williams took it on his bearded chin: Our God is an intelligent God. He created a universe that hangs together. But indeed, yes, the most difficult case is: If God can create such a universe, why can’t he do more?

And, said Dawkins, why go back to a story, Genesis, written in the eighth century B.C.? There is no reason to suppose the writers of it knew much. And now we do know much. Williams, with as near to asperity as his gentle demeanor allows, came back: If I want to understand 21st century science, I use its language. If I want to understand my moral and ethical place in the universe, I go to Genesis.

So there it was. Williams has probably mobilized more intellectual firepower in the retention of his faith than any other priest, rabbi, minister, imam or guru in the world. And when pushed by his most doughty opponent, the archbishop brings out, in an almost apologetic way, a confession. That, in the end, faith is what sustains him. That to locate himself as a moral actor in the world, he has chosen to believe; to accept the vast narrative that is the Christian tradition; to imagine his consciousness as part of an unconditional creative energy. He calls that energy God.

PHOTO: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (R) and atheist scholar Richard Dawkins pose for a photograph outside Clarendon House at Oxford University, before their debate in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, England, February 23, 2012.  REUTERS/Andrew Winning

Those who know Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, say he likes to test his opinions against robust argument, often at length. This column is an account of one such — imagined — conversation.

Netanyahu tends to see issues through the prism of the Holocaust, and the deep well of anti-Semitism it plumbed. On the part of the Nazis, of course, but also elsewhere in Europe — in Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Hungary, Romania and France. After the war was over and the facts of the Holocaust became known, returning Jews were attacked and killed in the Polish countryside, and Stalin embarked on a murderous anti-Semitic program which — had it not been for his death in 1953 — seemed set to result in at least some major pogroms, if not another mass killing on the scale of the Nazis’. This realization, for anyone Decent, is at least sobering. For a Jew, it raises the specter of an eternal horror that can rarely be wholly dismissed.

Just as Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, viewed Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser as an Arab Hitler when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, so Netanyahu tends to see Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the same reincarnation. That means that the Iranian president is, in the Israeli’s mind, not just a fanatical anti-Semite, but one who will pursue his fanaticism at all costs – including causing great damage to his own people.

Fanaticism trumps rationality. Rational people wish to stay alive; fanatics commit suicidal murder for a cause. Rational leaders weigh the costs and benefits of aggression; fanatical leaders pursue their aims to the point of killing their state. Netanyahu believes that Ahmadinejad is the latter sort of leader. And thus he is inclined to think that Israel has no choice but to launch a pre-emptive strike while Iranian nuclear facilities are still vulnerable and before Iran moves them deep underground to complete the final stages of producing nuclear weapons.

However, he knows that the Israeli political and military establishment, and society, is deeply torn on the issue. There is, as yet, no decision, no one line. The complexities of making such a decision are formidable, even by Middle Eastern standards. Thus, as one who likes to test his views, earlier this week he invited a distinguished political scientist, well versed in the threats and opportunities of Israeli security but known to be opposed to a pre-emptive strike, to argue with him one evening in his office.

The distinguished scholar begins by making a mistake. He mentions that Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, believed that the Iranians were some years away from producing a serviceable weapon, that the Iranian leadership was consumed with anxiety about its own society and the internal opposition it faced, and that the declaration by Ahmadinejad this week that scientists had built faster uranium enrichment centrifuges and had loaded homemade fuel plates into a reactor was bluff to cover serious problems in the nuclear program.

That is a mistake because Netanyahu sees Dagan not just as one who disagrees with him, but as a serious political threat. Dagan’s rhetoric on the issue was scornful: An attack on Iran, he said, “was the stupidest idea I had ever heard,” one that would spark regional war and unite the disparate allies against Israel. There have been hints that he was part of a group seeking the prime minister’s resignation. No advantage in that route.

The scholar thus begins to play what he believes is his best hand. Ahmadinejad, he says, may well wish for the destruction of Israel — but he is no absolute dictator on the Hitler-Stalin model. He is embedded in a regime that, whatever the rhetoric of its leaders, has a history of military caution. Not only is it not Nazi Germany, it is not Saddam’s Iraq, which was prepared to launch disastrous attacks on its neighbors — on Iran itself, in 1980, a war that lasted eight years and resulted in an estimated 1.5 million casualties, and on Kuwait a decade later, sparking Western retaliation and the rapid defeat of Iraq’s armed forces. Iran talks big, says the scholar, but acts cautiously.

This means, he continues, encouraged by the prime minister’s thoughtful silences, that even if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, it will not use it. It will be enough to possess it and to have a balance of terror. See, he says, warming to his theme, the example of India and Pakistan. Much has been said about the fact that these two hostile neighbors are nuclear powers, much rhetoric about Pakistan being the most dangerous place on earth. And…nothing.

Sanctions, he says, are biting hard, and they will bite harder. The U.S. is leaning toward seeking the expulsion of Iran from the SWIFT system — the network for processing financial transactions — a move that would greatly limit, or even render impossible, the country’s sales of oil and purchase of foreign goods, and cause instant damage to the economy. That move would come at a cost: SWIFT is an independent institution, and would have to be leaned on hard, and the disruption would be bad for fragile Western economies. But if the threat is thought to be large enough, it could be done.

The costs of aggression, says the political scientist, are inherently unknowable. The Arab Spring seems to favor Islamist parties, which may seek to bolster their new positions in government in Tunisia and in the future in Egypt with inflamed rhetoric against Israel and perhaps something more substantial. But they are divided: The civil war in Syria has weakened the militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas, and divided the Arab world. Now is not the time to give it a unifying cause.

It is 2 o’clock in the morning. The prime minister calls a halt. Thank you, he says, for your opinion, it was well put, and may be right. You are an acute reader of our neighborhood. I have benefited from this talk.

But, he says, as the weary scholar rises to go – what if you are wrong?

It’s a question with which any Israeli prime minister — including those less hawkish than the present incumbent –must be tormented. The slender strip of land that the Israelis occupy depends for its security on the technological and military prowess of the country’s armed forces, and on the continued support of the U.S. The latter has been wary of pre-emption. But close observers, like the distinguished political scientist, detect a growing mood in Washington that reluctantly concedes it may be the only option — though an option the U.S., not Israel, should exercise.

That’s in part because of the existential dimension to this — Iran might acquire the capacity to threaten Israel’s very existence — but it’s also because of the problems that would likely emerge even if Iran proves to be a rational actor. As Professor Shai Feldman of the Crown Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University wrote this month, Iran’s possession of a nuclear threat would both embolden its allies — Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas — and prompt “countries like Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia … to acquire nuclear weapons of their own, thus triggering a proliferation cascade.”

Ahmadinejad’s boast this week — that he will continue to develop the nuclear program, still claiming it to be peaceful, and that “the era of bullying nations has passed” — ramps up the tension, as it was bound, and designed, to do.

The posture of the Western nations, seeking to halt Iran by sanctions and pressure, is that their soft-power approach will work.

But what if they are wrong?

PHOTO: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference with Cypriot President Dimitris Christofias (not pictured) at the presidential palace in Nicosia, February 16, 2012 .  REUTERS/Andreas Manolis

Speak now to an intelligent European politician (having assured him or her that the conversation is off the record) and you will discover a deeply worried representative — and one who leaves you in a similar state. Whether they are in the European parliament or a national legislature, European politicians are now constrained to contemplate their powerlessness. And ours.

Ordinary members of parliaments often feel like that. But ministers, even of small states, who have been elected to represent, propose, plan and legislate, now feel it too, and more acutely. Especially in the countries that remain devoted to the idea that the state should protect its people from the hardships and, in some cases, the vicissitudes of life, people have been accustomed to expect much more in the way of protection. But politicians must now offer less. For many citizens, that provision, coupled with security, was the point of government. But now, as each week brings little respite, ministers, prime ministers and presidents feel powerless.

In part this is because one state, Germany, emasculates all others. It acts — nominally — with France, but the latter’s weakened economy and politically weaker president, Nicolas Sarkozy, makes the duopoly at the apex of the European Union one of the weak providing political cover for the strong more than a true meeting of equals. On Angela Merkel’s decisions, and those of the German parliament, hangs the fate of nations. She has not wished it so: Those who make the parallel between the Nazi savagery of 70 years ago and Germany’s present power indulge in a facile radicalism that owes nothing to observable reality. Yet however reluctantly, she disposes for a continent.

This reduces politicians in other states to colonial administrators, constrained to follow the policies determined by Berlin, endorsed by France, and proclaimed as inevitable by prevailing economic opinion. It means that when their unions demonstrate, their small businesses cry for help, their students grow hopeless about jobs and careers, and their vulnerable and aging citizens grow fearful for their supports and pensions, they can only say: It will pass, we will return to growth and the good times will roll once more. And yet they don’t know if it’s true.

They are paralyzed, caught between two sets of headlights bearing down upon them. Germany has decreed that all members of the euro zone sign on to a pact that will make  the economic and financial levers of national governance dependent on a central EU power — a move on which the European citizens are not to be consulted and that comes at a time when there is a gathering revulsion against the Union.

To say it is undemocratic is to say the obvious. In the member states, parties of the far right and left, long hostile to the EU, denounce it at meetings and in statements. The strongest of the extremists of the right, Marie Le Pen’s Front National party, which poses a real threat to Sarkozy’s ability to remain on the ballot through to the second round of France’s presidential election in April, has soft-pedaled its racism but accelerated its anti-Europeanism. One of its militants, a translator named Guy Rondel, was quoted in the Financial Times this week as saying that “I think we should leave Europe. They decide everything and we have no say.” How much that remains a minority view depends on the success of the French president’s Merkel maneuver. Failure would play well for Ms. Le Pen.

If countries took Mr. Rondel’s advice, and left “Europe,” or at least the euro, then, indeed, democracy could be restored. Control of the currency would allow a devaluation, making domestically produced goods cheaper both at home and abroad. Fiscal decisions could again be taken by ministers. Industries could be protected.

But the relief would be temporary. Indeed, it might be illusory. The restoration of the drachma, the peseta or the lire would be followed by a ferocious attack on the new/old currency, driving it down — and leaving the government and the banks with debts even more vast because they are still denominated in euros. Unemployment, already high, would leap. Faith in conventional politics, already faltering, would collapse. Democracy would tremble, extremism gain.

The promise of the EU was to provide both protection and dynamism; the former from a welfare state, the latter from the removing of barriers to the international market. Protection, in many states, cannot be sustained at past levels. Dynamism, meanwhile, happened largely in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, while the southern states borrowed heavily over the past decade to finance their welfare states and disguise their decreasing competitiveness.

Governments, banks and corporations were all complicit in this. But so were citizens, forgetting all the tedious old warnings, dating back as far as Polonius in Hamlet: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” (And wasn’t Polonius king of the bores?) They racked up easily extended debt, careless of a reckoning. Now the reckoning is here, and its stakes are higher than even the Poloniuses thought.

Faced with a rapidly devaluing mandate, the intelligent European politician can do little but hope that Germany, the great European phoenix of our time, knows what it’s doing and will do it with care, returning us to growth. But it will do so without our assent. Because we have taken ourselves into a cul de sac from which there is no democratic exit.

PHOTO: A combination of three pictures shows German Chancellor Angela Merkel as she reacts during a discussion of the BELA (Broader European Leadership Agenda) foundation at the Neues Museum art gallery in Berlin, February 7, 2012.    REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch