Boris: What say the augurers?
Professor Neil Ferguson: They would not have you to stir forth to-day. Plucking the entrails of an offering forth, they could not find a heart within the beast.
We think, of course, that science has rather progressed since the time of Julius Caesar. We no longer rely on priests to predict the future by means of studying the flight of birds or by slaughtering animals and rummaging around in their entrails. Science has triumphed over religion to the extent that the belief in the truth of Christianity is in inverse proportion to the amount of Christmas lights decorating the outside of a person’s home. We may still be culturally Christian, but few indeed believe the literal truth of the Christmas story. ln Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire miracles hardly ever happen.
Our lifestyle and the progress that has made our lives
so much more pleasant and longer lasting than previous centuries is undoubtedly
due to the scientific discoveries on which we rely without question. We don’t
question the science of aeroplanes nor generally of medicine. We do not think
that Television sets will send out dangerous rays that will kill us, nor on
going to the doctor and being told to take these pills for a couple of weeks do
we search the Internet to look up all the possible side effects. Scientists today
are as respected as Caesar respected the augurs.
Some scientists have had an extremely good pandemic. Those
doctors who devised new techniques to treat Covid have undoubtedly saved huge
numbers of lives. Those scientists who created vaccines in record time have
doubtless saved still more. Without them we would have been able to delay Covid
by means of lockdown and social distancing, but eventually we would have had to
face it without any protection at all. It would have killed far more of us.
But while these scientists have had a good pandemic,
those who have attempted to predict the future by means of epidemiologic modelling
have done no better and sometimes worse than those who attempted to tell Caesar
what would happen by means of chicken entrails.
There are different sorts of science and our government
has not done enough to distinguish between them. While we accept that
economists have a certain expertise and that there are economic principles that
are useful in understanding how economies work, we also recognise that
economists cannot predict with certainty which stocks will rise tomorrow and
which will fall. They cannot tell exactly on which date the stock market will
crash nor indeed whether Brexit will be advantageous economically for Britain
or disadvantageous.
The modelling that George Osborne and friends used to
predict disaster if voters dared to vote to leave the EU turned out to be no
more accurate than the modelling that Professor Neil Ferguson and the rest of
the SAGE experts used to predict the various waves of Covid. Of course, they claim
not to be predicting at all, which is a nice get out clause for augurs. If we
tell you not to step forth Julius and you get murdered in your bed, don’t blame
us. If modelling doesn’t predict the future, why is it used by government to
inform policy any more than chicken entrails?
It is clear by now that the epidemiologic modellers
have very limited power to predict what will happen with Covid. Sometimes they
have said if you open up Covid will rise and lots of people will die, but the
opposite occurs. At this point the scientific method ought to discard this method
of attempting to explain the world. But it doesn’t. SAGE is still full of such
modellers. They still publish respected articles in prestigious journals.
Government still listens and the public is expected to obey.
The problem in universities at the moment is that
large numbers of academics are teaching nonsense. Men can become women.
Critical race theory. Culloden has an important connection to slavery. All of
these experts are held up by each other. They peer review each other’s papers.
No one dares point out the lack of clothing on the emperor. It is as if we are
caught in the age of phrenology. Will the future look at us and laugh that we
could have believed such things?
There is a limit to human knowledge. We cannot predict
the future. No one guessed that in March 2020 we would have Lockdown and a
pandemic that would last into 2022. Even in January and February of that year
we were still going on holiday and reading reports of an illness in China with
minimal concern. The modellers of SAGE did not tell us to close the borders weeks
before Lockdown. They initially told us that masks were useless and then
without any real experimental evidence they told us we must wear them. They told
us to wash our hands, but later pointed out that Covid was air borne.
It is not that these people are charlatans. But they
do think that they know more than they do. If there is one fault with scientists
it is their certainty that science is the only way to arrive at truth and that
no truth can hide from science. It is this that turned Christmas into the gaudy
spectacle of lights and trees and excess consumption.
The Archbishop of Canterbury knows that he lives in a
secular country, for which reason he comes across as bossy little Lib Dem councillor.
Jesus would not have needed a vaccine, because if he caught Covid he could have
cured himself just as he cured a man with leprosy and if he had died it would
not have mattered because he would have risen again on the third day.
The Christmas story approaches the limit of our
understanding, because it deals with miracles. Everything that is important
about Christianity is miraculous. A virgin birth. Water turns into wine. Some
loaves and fishes feed five thousand. God becomes man, dies and rises again.
Without the miracles you have nothing and you certainly wouldn’t be celebrating
it two thousand years later. Odd then that we do. The Church rather hides the
miraculous in favour of the left-wing lectures and wonders why it declines.
But we reach the limit of our understanding every day
when we face the future. None of us know what will happen with Covid next year.
It will I think fizzle out into milder versions until it is just like every
other coronavirus floating around. But I don’t know that. There might be a new
more deadly variant that kills every animal except amoebas. The Greens would naturally
be delighted as the planet would be saved from the fossil fuel burners. But
saved for whom?
We face the limit of our understanding each moment
when we choose and exercise our free will and when we sense ourselves as not
being material objects, but rather something quite different. When we judge an
action to be moral or immoral, we likewise implicitly think of it as free and
not caused by a sequence of material causes. But each choice then becomes a
minor miracle for science cannot really explain it. Science only deals with the
physical and every cause is mechanistic. For which reason it never quite grasps
humanity.
Ceasar’s augurs were right. He should not have stepped
forth that day. He should have stayed in Lockdown. But they didn’t really know
what was going to happen and nor does Professor Ferguson. Human beings are not
to be corralled by Ferguson’s models, because we are free and each of us is
miraculous. Science can no more grasp the miracle in each of us than it can
predict with certainty how people will react to a mutant variant and how many
of them will get sick.
Human beings are complex, free moral beings. We are
not determined and we will resist those who try to control us. We face the
limits of our understanding each moment for none of us can guess what will
happen tomorrow let alone next year. Covid reminded us of this. It’s why we
need faith and hope to face that future.
That is the message of Christmas. It is a message that
we have lost somewhere amongst the paper wrapping and the tinsel. Look inside
and you will find something miraculous that you might just have overlooked. It
is the eternal in time.
Have a very Happy Christmas and let us all hope for
better times ahead.
