The best possible world?

Matthew Paris is an intelligent man.  I often enjoy reading his comment, but his most recent column in The Times shows up the poverty of the religious mind.

In the column, he says,

Fascinating to read on The Times's letters page last week a discussion among Darwinian Christians about how a loving God could have allowed (for instance) the creation of worms that burrow into animals' eyes. This took the debate full circle: back to 30 years before this paper was founded, and the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, featured in Voltaire's Candide.

The catastrophe provoked anguish about how God could allow such suffering. The 17th-century thinker Gottfried Leibniz had asserted that (1) a loving God would have created the best world He could; (2) there exists a loving God; ergo (3) this must be the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire mocks this, through his ludicrously optimistic Dr Pangloss.

I feel for Leibniz, a mathematician and a genius, who only asserts that if you believe in a loving God it follows that, good or bad, the world could not have been better. Voltaire's shallow knockabout does not answer a logical sequence whose sole vulnerable assertion was that there exists a beneficent God. If Voltaire did not believe this he should have had the guts to say so. Instead he cheated. As a boy I stopped reading Candide here and have ignored Voltaire since.

 

What a glib answer!  Voltaire’s argument is flippant, and that’s the point, it is also a serious discussion about suffering.

You do not even need take the idea of evolution seriously (as I take it Paris does) which implies that there has been suffering and death on a monumental scale for hundreds of millions of years to see the flaw in Leibniz’s argument.  What a supporter of Leibniz is committed to is that not a single one of any instance of suffering could be removed or even mitigated without the world becoming a worse place.

We now have anaesthetics.  Does Paris really believe that the application of a narcotic (by God) to a suffering child (in circumstances where it would be given today) especially in circumstances where not only that child, but also all witnesses to that suffering would shortly also die (such as in a family during the Black Death or in a remote sea wreak) would have been a bad thing?  Does he support the use of pain relieving drugs today?

The idea we live in the best possible world does not need logical refutation, the fact that it is so easily mocked and derided in its own terms is evidence that it is a faulty idea.

Laughter is our best weapon.  That’s why it’s rare to see religious leaders happy!

Christian Nurse Back On The Job

Caroline Petrie, the nurse who was suspended for offering to pray for a patient will be allowed to continue working.

The statement from the North Somerset Primary Care Trust reads in full:

New statement regarding Caroline Petrie, North Somerset nurse

Issued 5 February 2009

NHS North Somerset have contacted bank nurse Caroline Petrie with a view to her returning back to work as soon as she feels able. We have always been keen to bring this matter to a timely resolution. It has been a distressing and difficult time for Caroline and all staff involved.

We recognise the concerns raised by the many people who have contacted us about this situation. We feel we were right to investigate the concerns from people about Caroline’s actions. We are always respectful of our patients’ views, and we will always strive to ensure our staff meet professional standards such as the Nursing and Midwifery Council Code of Conduct and any policies and procedures which are designed to maintain high standards.

However, we are keenly aware of the importance of an individual’s spiritual belief, and we recognise that Caroline felt that she was acting in the best interests of her patients. For some people of faith, prayer is seen as an integral part of health care and the healing process. That is why NHS services in North Somerset offer spiritual support such as chaplaincy and prayer rooms, for example, available for use by people of all faiths.

It is acceptable to offer spiritual support as part of care when the patient asks for it.

But for nurses, whose principal role is giving nursing care, the initiative lies with the patient and not with the nurse. Nurses like Caroline do not have to set aside their faith, but personal beliefs and practices should be secondary to the needs and beliefs of the patient and the requirements of professional practice.

We are glad to make this position clear so that Caroline and other staff who have a faith continue to offer high quality care for patients while remaining committed to their beliefs. We hope Caroline can return to work as soon as she feels able. For more information please contact Communication Team

I think this is an excellent statement.  It balances the needs of patients for autonomy and privacy with respect to their religious beliefs, and with the desire of religious people to bring what “spiritual comfort” to their patients that they can. 

I think it is obvious that a very religious patient might receive considerable solace from a prayer with their carer, regardless of the actual efficacy of that action, and it would be wrong to deny those patients who explicitly request it that solace.  But at the same time, it is wrong to impose your version of “religious solace” on an unwilling or even a disinterested third party.

As secularists, we do not want to stop people believing in or acting upon their religious beliefs.  Indeed, it is almost a necessary element of secularism that we be in favour of freedom of belief for religious believers, but we know that their freedom of belief stops the moment another person might be affected – if that other person does not consent to the religious practise, then it stops being a matter of the freedom of religion of the practitioner and it becomes a matter of balancing competing rights of freedom of religion, and the other person’s rights to autonomy and privacy.

There is one point that was made in an earlier press statement by the North Somerset PCT which hasn’t been covered in the most recent statement:

There are grounds for wondering whether the nurse’s sincere faith convictions about the efficacy of intercessory prayer are more strongly held than her commitment to a pattern of practice consistent with her professional role.

It does appear that Ms Petrie has a higher level of trust in the curative power of intercessory prayer than the evidence warrants (ie she believes that it is not totally worthless).  It is worrying that Ms Petrie would make statements to the Guardian such as

She said she had seen her supplications have real effects on patients, including a Catholic woman whose urine infection cleared up days after she said a prayer.

I still think that the Nursing and Midwifery Council Code might have something to say about that:

You must deliver care based on the best available evidence or best practice

and

You must ensure any advice you give is evidence based if you are suggesting healthcare products or services

Ms Petrie should continue to do the excellent job she has been doing, and ensure that she restricts her spiritual assistance to those patients who willingly request it from her.

Pope Un-excommunicates Holocaust Denier

Opps!

I don’t understand.  I thought that the Pope’s magical powers/direct hotline to God would have intervened before he did something this stupid.

Did Ratzinger not get his special tingly Pope-sense that this would be a mistake, or is he *gasp* just an ordinary man with no special/magical powers at all?

Christian Nurse Suspended Over Prayer Offer

This story.

Caroline Petrie, a “bank” nurse has been told by the North Somerset primary care trust that she will not be receiving any more offers of work until an inquiry into her alleged offer to pray for an elderly patient of the Trust has reported back.  The patient had informally complained to the Trust.  The patient said, “But it could perhaps be upsetting for some other people if they have different beliefs or thought that she meant they looked in such a bad way that they needed praying for”.  Ms Petrie claims “I am upset because I enjoy this job and it [prayer] is a valuable part of the care I give.”

Ms Petrie’s comment highlights the central issue.  Religion is a deeply personal and private matter.  To bring your religion into your workplace and even obliquely suggest that people should engage themselves with your own religious rituals shows a level of insensitivity and selfishness that is incompatible with a “caring” profession.

No-one is suggesting that Ms Petrie, in the words of the Daily Mail front page splash is being “Persecuted for praying”.  She is not being told to not pray, nor to do anything that is against her conscience.  Rather, she is being told that her behaviour is inappropriate.  The Nursing and Midwifery Council Code states, “You must not use your professional status to promote causes that are not related to health”, furthermore it states that “You must treat people as individuals and respect their dignity” and “You must not discriminate in any way against those in your care”.  

The problem is that Ms Petrie wants to do two contradictory things.  She appears to be a caring person who wants to help people as a nurse, but she also wants to act as an evangelist.  She needs to choose what’s more important to her.  No-one would suggest that Ms Petrie should not preach the Gospel to whosoever she can find to agree to listen on her own time or if she was employed as a religious worker by someone, but to expect her to be able to pursue her religious hobby at work is a silly as a stamp collector being aggrieved that they aren’t allowed to spend all their time at the post office while they are supposed to be at work.  The fact that this is the second time she’s been carpeted over this suggests that it’s the evangelism that’s most important.  Who is to say how many vulnerable people have not had the courage to stand up to her?

To wish for a secular society is not to wish religious people silent, it is to recognise that religion has its own time and place.  That time and place is not at work.  Ms Petrie needs to consider what’s the most important thing for her.

As an afterword, I think that it is excellent that the Code also states, “You must deliver care based on the best available evidence or best practice” and “You must ensure any advice you give is evidence based if you are suggesting healthcare products or services”.  Prayer is totally ineffective as a treatment as demonstrated by numerous studies, including, for example, the total indifference that God show towards amputees.

Finally, in an attempt to measure the delusion that Ms Petrie is operating under, consider the statement attributed to her in the Guardian,

She said she had seen her supplications have real effects on patients, including a Catholic woman whose urine infection cleared up days after she said a prayer.

Really? A urine infection went away after a few days?  A miracle!  A miracle!  Perhaps Ms Petrie was also administering antibiotics at the same time?  Does she know that some infections just go away all by themselves (with a little help from the immune system) even without prayer being used?

As Mark Twain wrote on the effectiveness of prayer, “Rain always follows prayer, so long as the prayer is continued long enough”.

Should Parking Regulations Apply To All?

This story (via The Religion of Peace) struck me, because the moral of it seems so clear.

The long and the short of it is that the parking wardens of Swindon have hitherto ignored parking violations by the worshippers at a local mosque during Friday prayers.  However, they have recently become to actually enforce the rules, which has driven the mosque-goers into a “fury” (in the words of the article).

Coun Derique Montaut (Lab, Central): “At one stage traffic wardens took a softly softly approach.

“But we are now saying everyone should be treated the same. There should be no privileges.”

To which the mosque-goers retort,

Mansoor Khan, secretary of the Thamesdown Islamic Association, said: “The parking situation is atrocious.

“We are getting sick and tired of it. People don’t have time to go to a car park and walk, as they are on their lunch break from work.”

Muhammad Ali, a representative of the Marat Shahjalal mosque in Manchester Road, said spaces are empty during Islamic prayer time, as residents are at work anyway.

“A lot of prayer goers are getting tickets every week,” he said.

“It is causing unnecessary arguments. I don’t think it is too much to ask for us to be allowed to park in empty resident parking spaces for one hour.

“People should be facilitated for religious purposes.”

This fundamentally comes down to fairness.  When there are rules applied for the public good (like parking regulations) it is objectionable if a minority demand a special exemption.

It is doubly objectionable if that exemption is demanded because of a religious belief (you must not discriminate against me, but you must, at the same time discriminate in favour of me).

There are many groups who would like to be able to park (just for an hour, just on Tuesdays, there’s no-one else there), and then you’re back in the same situation you were in before the regulations were introduced. Nuddy2, a commenter on the article says:

 

I remember only too well the parking situation before res. park was brought in, when every Tom Dick and Harry used to park here to go shopping or football and so did many of the employees at Garrards, it was a joke trying to find a parking space if you were a resident.

Let there be one law for everybody, and let us be wary of special interest groups (especially faith-based special interest groups) demanding special privileges.