food of various sorts

December is the slackest month, full of parties and indulgence and needless expenditure and occasional unexpected adventures, and right now I’m under the influence of free champagne and Footsteps Verdelho, after finishing off the SACHA Chrissie drinks and new policy launch with a loopy car drive and a spectacular dinner at the pressed-tin-ceilinged Royal Oak, barramundi steak with a superb mango aioli, skordalia and fresh greens. Distracted by beautiful women, including the slim servitor with the impish welcoming smile, I still managed to keep up conversation about Elizabeth 1’s nerve-wracking childhood and John Shakespeare’s contretemps with the authorities. On more recent matters, Sarah was delighted at Jan Sundberg’s praise for her mediation skills, referring to Sarah’s recent outing at an internal appeal for another co-op, and felt that even John S, who she’s convinced doesn’t like her, pricked up his ears at the eminently respectable Jan’s fulsomeness. Not bad, thinks she, for a mere husswife and muddling mother. Sarah wasn’t as thrilled with her wild mushroom tart as I was with my slight but totally tasty main meal, but then I can’t even remember what I ate there last time, an occasion she still raves about, so now we’re even. It was a wrench leaving the place, the fresh lively faces, the dj’s jazz, but I have white hair and wouldn’t be missed.

Keith Ward, Gresham Professor of Divinity at Cambridge College, London, would undoubtedly take issue with my claim that science’s success in explaining and, in a sense, expanding the material world has left little space for the metaphysical realm that provides oxygen to religious belief. His view is that, on the contrary, modern physics is more than amenable to godly speculation. Almost every popular science book has a final chapter about God and the creation of the universe, he writes, surely more hopefully than accurately. Indeed, modern physics makes belief in God more plausible than it has ever been since Kant.

Now, before examining more closely this plausibility, I need to make the obvious but nonetheless very pertinent point that even if our current theories in physics did render a deity more plausible, this would in no way provide evidence for a particular model of the deity, in the Koran, the Bible, the Talmud or whatever, being true, and it is the pushing of these particular models of deity, with all their pronouncements, characteristics and creative or destructive acts, that causes all the anguish, consternation and hostility in the world (between religions and between the religious and the not), not mere belief in a deity an sich.