Anthony Campbell's blog

My new book, Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination, is just out and is available from Lulu. It will be available from Amazon etc. in about 6-8 weeks.

Description
There seems to be a widespread notion that belief is, in itself, a good thing, but in this book I argue that, for at least some people, freeing oneself from all belief systems brings a huge sense of belief. I illustrate this by describing my own experience of Roman Catholicism and Transcendental Meditation. I also look at the evidence for miraculous cures for cancer and at ideas about the soul, with particular reference to survival. And I have a discussion of how religions are transmitted, which I think depends on story-telling and language as much as on formal belief.

My book Homeopathy in Perspective is now available from Lulu, both as a paperback book and as a download. It is also available from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

This is a book about what homeopathy is, how it developed, where it stands today. It is a critical book but not a hatchet job. It is written for people with questioning minds. Anyone who has already adopted a fixed opinion about homeopathy, either for or against, may receive the odd shock.

No prior knowledge is assumed but the book is not only for beginners. Even if you have read quite a lot about homeopathy you will probably find that you view it differently when you have finished.

The book is written with inside knowledge. I was a consultant physician at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital for over 20 years.

This blog is primarily written for my own purposes, to try out ideas and pieces of writing that interest me but which don't (yet) merit a full-length article on my web page. Like the rest of what I write, the tone is mainly sceptical. In so far as there is a general theme, it's meant to be my own modest contribution to keeping alive the values of the Enlightenment, which seem to be under increasing threat today.

My review of Cancer: The evolutionary legacy, by Mel Greaves, is now available on my book reviews page. As the subtitle indicates it presents an evolutionary view of its subject and is essentially a book about Darwinian medicine. Recommended.

My review of Whem Life Nearly Died, by Michael J. Benton is now out. This is the second book on the end-Permian extinction I've reviewed recently. See my book reviews page.

Excellent news! The Japanese whalers have apparently given in to pressure from the anti-whaling protesters after killing only half as many whales as they intended. Here's hoping they now give up their so-called research programme permanently, though I fear that's unlikely. Still, well done the protesters.

Today's Independent has several letters disagreeing with a piece by Bethan Marshall (4 April) in which she said she didn't see much need for punctuation. Dr Marshall is a senior lecturer in English Education at King's College, London: talk about a treachery of the clerks!

She starts her piece with the one word "Punctuation", to make the point that there is nothing wrong with one-word or verbless sentences. This, of course, is irrelevant to the subject she is supposed to be writing about, but it preoccupies her throughout much of the essay.

When she does finally get round to talk about punctuation she says that many children use a comma for a short pause, full stop for a long pause, and a semicolon for an in-between pause, and remarks: "I punctuate that way largely myself."

This admission, of course, shows she hasn't understood the most basic purpose of punctuation, which is nothing to do with pausing for breath and everything to do with making the sense clear. Punctuation is there to prevent the need for double takes by the reader who is trying to get at the sense.

Another essay in same issue of The Independent defends the use of punctuation. It's by Philip Hensher and concentrates almost entirely on the use of the semicolon. I sympathize, being excessively addicted to these things myself. In fact, I'm trying to cut down on my use of them and just went through my latest book, pruning some of the semicolons. The result, I think, was a tautening of the writing.

What neither writer focused on sufficiently was the element of custom in punctuation. Fashions change in punctuation, as in everything else. I find David Hume, like other seventeenth-century writers, quite irritating to read becaus of their habit of scattering unnecessary commas all over the place. Makes for a bumpy read.

But just because punctuation changes does not mean that it doesn't matter. The ability to punctuate well is a basic skill that the writer needs to acquire, just as avoiding sinking is a basic skill for someone who hopes to become an Olympic-class swimmer or the ability to remember your lines is needed by would-be actors. It's not enough in itself but it's an essential step before you can even begin.

Some fifty years ago Evelyn Waugh was lamenting the disappearance of what he called the lost art of punctuation. It hasn't disappeared yet, but it does need to be practised.

My review of The Jung Cult, by Richard Noll, is now available on my book reviews page.

I've just posted two new reviews to my book reviews page: The Dog Allusion, by Martin Rowson, and The Jung Cult, by Richard Noll.

I've just published my review of this book on my site. Dodds was Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and also author of an important book (also reviewed), The Greeks and the Irrational.

For understandable reasons, most of the argument that has been occasioned by the current furore about hybrid embryos has focused on the question of freedom of conscience for MPs. But I think the Catholic Church is really worried about something deeper, which is the implication of this research for the Church's teaching about conception and the soul.

The Church holds that a soul is infused into the embryo at the moment of conception. This idea has its roots in premodern theories of embryology that make little sense today. The existence of germ cells containing a mixture of human and animal DNA is difficult to reconcile with the Church's view. Would these embryos have a new kind of soul, part human, part animal?

The point is that the potential existence of such cells has profound implications for Church dogma, even if they were never actually produced. This may in part be why the bishops are so opposed to the research.

A couple of years ago Rageh Omar made some TV programmes about the miracles of Jesus which I wrote about here (21 August 2006). I continue to be puzzled about his agenda, having seen this Easter his new programme (BBC2) about the Shroud of Turin.

Although he did not say outright that the Shroud is authentic, that was the implication of the way the programme was made. There was much more that was positive than negative. The thrust of the discussion was to cast doubt on the earlier radiocarbon dating which appeared to show that the Shroud had been made in the fourteenth century. Believers in the Shroud in the USA have advanced a theory to explain why this date is erroneous. though I found the description a little hard to follow.

Samples of new cloth were prepared as a test for the new theory and were submitted to the lab in Cambridge where the original radiocarbon dating was done. The results were negative - the theory was not confirmed, this far at least. I thought the professor in Cambridge (not the one who was there when the original tests were done) sounded politely incredulous.

There are certainly some odd features about the Shroud, notably the fact that the nails in the figure were inserted in the wrists and heels, which is what would have happened in reality but was not known to be the case in the Middle Ages. And there is no agreement about how the image could have been created.

What I found most intriguing about the programme was the claim that the blood group on both the Shroud and a Sudarium (face cloth) held in Spain have been identified as AB, the rarest group. If this is true, has any attempt been made to establish a DNA profile for the blood? If so, what were the results, and if not, why not? The results might be very interesting for claims of a Virgin Birth and in other ways as well. This was just one of the important questions that were left hanging.

My review of Johh Hick's book An Interpretation of Religion is now available on my site.

I've just published my review of J.G. Bennett's autobiography Witness. Bennett was a perpetual "seeker", always looking for the secret of spiritual enlightenment and always more or less disappointed by what he found. He seems to me the perfect illustration of what I have called elsewhere "the Casaubon delusion", after the character in George Eliot's Middlemarch.

Jodrell Bank is under threat of closure, because it requires £2.5 million to make use of a new telescope which has already been built. So Britain is to lose its honoured place in radio astronomy for want of this trivial sum. And then we wring our hands (or some of us do) at the failure of young people to study science at university!