Sometimes, A Little Worrying

So there's Linear Algebra coming up this semester, and a couple of friends have told me that it's impossibly hard. Harder than MA1521 (Calculus). I'm starting to be a little worried. One of my friends got an A- for it. Another, who does consistent work, got C+.

"How'd you do it?" I asked.

"Being consistent is not enough. It's just not enough." says the latter friend.

"Oh, urm, do everything." Says the former. "All the tutorials, and all the questions in the tutorials. And if you don't understand, just redo the questions."

So, in theory the strategy for doing math is simple: keep doing consistent work, and keep practicing. But knowing something and being able to execute it are two different things. I'm able to consistently execute practice-heavy modules if I like it (e.g.: programming). But I have a history of being bad at Math. Math's my Kryptonite.

I'll have to figure out what's the difference between the two. And why I seem to shy away from anything that requires math (e.g.: physics). This is largely internal; local to the way I think, and no amount of advice by well-meaning people would help until I do.

The first Linear Algebra lecture starts in one and a half hours. Eigenvectors, here I come.

If God Did Not Exist, It Would Be Necessary To Invent Him

I bring two pieces of good news (and one slightly sad rant, to do with the title of the post today, but that'll be in a bit).


First, the Thomians won the Thomian-Marian debate tournament this year, the first time they've done so in 8 years. (I should add that I added to this record: we lost the Marian-Thomian debate in 2005 because I — erm — got carried away by the crowd and did a horrible job as third). The motion this year: THW revoke the quota for women in executive jobs.

It was good because they did well, running a competent opposition case and clashing with the Marians at all points of the debate, as opposed to them winning on the grounds of being the 'slightly-less-lousy' team. Plus: we had a good time watching the match, and — I think this was true for Paul and Sam and Kevin as it was for me — we went home rather happy with the results. They were all pretty promising.

In other news, Ida, Kevin and I were treated to lunch by the Greenian squirrels earlier today. They carted us off to Hartz Chicken, after which Kevin invited us over to Swinburne to debate BP style.

(The Greenians were all very excited about this).


A note about the young Greenians: I have never before met a team of hyperactive debators so awesome and so driven. They're eager to learn, never down and out, not too serious, and are getting bloody good at debate. Granted, they've got a bit more to go before being absolutely great, but I'm willing to bet that they'll be a team worth watching in a couple of years.

Now on to the sad, serious bit: the BP style motion we debated on was THBT If God Did Not Exist, It Would Be Necessary To Invent Him. I was first speaker for the closing Opp.

Paul opened the debate by defining God as a principle, or 'anything we devote ourselves to, be it an obsession, a deity, a stance or a philosophy'. This was an odd sort of setup, bordering on a squirrel, but he thought it an interesting enough case to run.

Fortunately for us he then spent the last half of his speech on argumentation: that a moral landscape requires a God to function, without which moral systems would fall apart — this was an old Christian argument, one the atheists have long had responses for, and it was something Opp could grab on to and harp about.

Which was what happened next: Kevin opened the opp bench by misrepresenting Paul's case-set, and then he re-set it in a more conventional place: God is God, and if tomorrow we were to find out that He was a lie, then it would not be necessary to invent Him, for there are systems of morality out there that do not depend on God's existence to work. Kevin's main argument was that people can only believe in something that's proven to be real. Therefore, creating a religion around a fiction is no good for both the believer and the morality imposed by that system.

I extended Opening Opp's case by arguing that we are already living a Godless society. So what's the big deal if God were to die tomorrow?

We will go home today and drive back to our Godless lives; we watch and read a Godless media, we are governed by a Godless government, and we study — or at least our kids have — a Godless education. Let's face it, ladies and gentlemen: if God were to be proven fake tomorrow, society probably wouldn't even bat an eyelid - we're already living as if God did not exist.

It broke my heart a little when I said that. Mostly because I realized that it was true.

I can't decide if there's any way to reconcile that with a God-centric society. History has shown us that whenever God and Government are mixed, bad things happen. No matter how good God is supposed to be, man will screw up; so the saying goes: from the crooked timber of man no straight thing was ever made.

And this has been happening for a very long time. It used to be that God was the center of society. Religion played a huge role in just about everything - government, wars, schools of thought. And then it failed. Fast forward a couple decades - mankind turned its faith to the philosophies of government. There was, for a time, a huge amount of belief in democracy and communism, and socialism, and so on so forth. People fought wars over such things. But we all know how that turned out - we were let down, yet again, with the fall of the Second World.

Today, we live in what academics call a Postmodern world. There is nothing at the centre of society. Relativism rules the day: you can be of one religion and I of another, and it's perfectly alright because your religion governs your values, and mine governs mine. Everything is relative, nothing is absolutely true. And so the value systems that we regard highly today aren't particularly beholden to any one morality.

This was a highly simplified summary of the development of the Postmodern world, but again I spoke with an internal voice screaming away at me. I think it's an incredibly odd thing to be a staunch Christian and to argue for the development of a Godless society. It's sad because it's against all I believe in, and it's sad because it's true.

How does this link to the motion? Well, if God were to die tomorrow, we would not need to invent him. We already live without Him. And despite side Government's case that morality will crumble without a divine base, we know this to be fake: today, we live without God, and we have not descended into anarchy.

(...) What keeps mankind from descending into chaos? For starters, we already have systems of morality that do not require God to exist. But — and we know this, do we not? Society is kept from anarchy because we believe in secular ideas of wrong and right: ideas of human rights, and the social contract, and the harm principle, and the principles of truth and justice. Our government has long enforced right and wrong without the authority of God, and we can very well survive the loss of a deity. After all, we no longer hear a politician justifying a case with the Bible as his reasoning. We hear him arguing from principles of justice, or equality, or rights. This wasn't true a hundred years ago — a hundred years ago we would have heard theological arguments — but today, never.

And so, I wonder now: what if it's impossible to have a God-fearing, God-loving society? The right-wing Christian nuts in the GOP, for instance, have shown us how idiotic such an approach might morph into — instead of sharing in the grace of God, they mandate such laws as the right to deny service to a homosexual in the state of Texas, the right to teach creationism (and ignore scientific evidence w/r/t evolution) in Louisiana, and they reject global warming simply because 'the Bible doesn't say so.'

It's often a common refrain in churches to talk of 'revival'. "Let's bring revival across the land!", they cry. But what if that's not possible, due to the lessons we have learned that led to the separation of church and state?

I'm no longer sure I would support a theocracy, even one supported by a coalition of churches. But now that I'm writing this, I think that there could be something in having a Godly government. Like the founding fathers, who believed in the separation of Church and State and yet created their government on the bedrock of Godly principles. Maybe that would work. I don't know.

What I do know is this: if God did not exist, it would certainly not be necessary to invent him. Society already lives without him - it is possible to go through your entire week with no connection with God beyond the compulsory Sunday service. We live in a Godless world, and it would be a lie to say it isn't so.