Sceptical Christian 4 -Sport and games

Sport is another human universal, though individuals respond to it in different ways and with different degrees of passion and interest.  It is universal in that it is important to all known human societies, throughout history and throughout the world, though some would argue that the term be restricted to the highly organised forms of physical competition which is such a feature of the modern world.

Games have a lot in common with sports. In particular  both activities involve arbitrary rules which are designed to make an ordinary human activity (such as getting from A to B) more challenging, by introducing hurdles or placing restrictions on the sort of moves than can be made. It may be argued that many games lack the physicality needed to be a true sport, while other, more playful, physical activities lack the seriousness of intent, or even sufficiently clear rules,  to  even count as games. No doubt these distinctions are valid, and very important to people and organisations dedicated to particular activities, but from other points of view they can seem arbitrary, which is not surprising since arbitrariness, in the form of arbitrary rules, is at the heart of all the play activities, games and sports known in all human societies. This perhaps explains why every game and sport is seen as puzzlingly pointless to those outside or unmoved by the activity.

It’s possible to give some evolutionary or developmental point or purpose to play, for example, relating it to developing the practical and social skills necessary for participating in society. Similarly, it is easy to make a connection between the celebrated athletics of the Ancient Greeks and the demands of constant inter-city warfare. You could extend this to explain the universal attraction of hunting (incidentally, the activity which gave us the words ‘game’ and ‘sport’). No putative explanation along these lines is ever very convincing, however,  except at the most general level, and none explains the excitement of watching or following a game or a sport.

Sport seems practically always to have taken place in the context of competition between individuals or groups, or man and animal, or man and nature. At the level of the individual participant, it obviously involves the need to develop and refine control over all aspects of the body’s functioning. This can be extended to your precise physical and moral contribution to a group effort. It is clear that pleasure in physical activity relates to complex, precise and global internal and external sense mechanisms and reactions. Whatever it is, it gives immense pleasure even at the cost of enormous pain. Excited onlookers and honour and glory for the winners are part of the cultural life of every society, as are constantly retold tales of struggle, defeat and victory, at the national, local and family levels. It is a curious activity.

Today many of these traditional activities have been refined and institutionalised (most notably in the Olympic Games, the World Cup, Wimbledon and the like, but extending to all levels below down to casual games in a park or on village green. They involve immense riches, often obscure powerbrokers and dubious politics, and the active or passive participation of billions throughout the world. For many millions it is the most important of all human activities. Millions of others are indifferent to what seems a pointless activity and are bemused by the hype or outraged at the squandered resources, the corruption and cheating and the endless scandals at the top. Millions of sports fans are similarly outraged, but never lose sight of the joy and the hope, the excitement and despair, not to mention the routine pleasure that physical activity seems mysteriously to bring with it.

Sceptical Christian 3 - Mathematics and logic

Mathematics is a bit like music, most obviously in its abstract structure, though considerations of beauty and elegance are also important to many participants in mathematical activities. Originally concerned with the ordinary human activities of counting, measuring and comparing, mathematicians have for thousands of years investigated  a vast, mysterious world of abstract objects such as the many types of numbers, though these by no means exhaust the mathematical world. There are discoverable principles and processes relating these strange objects to each other. These too are part of this abstract, but very real, world.

Of course, mathematics has continued to be crucially important in counting, measuring and comparing, especially in science, engineering, economics, statistics and all aspects of the modern world, including information technology. In all these areas, mathematicians have been vastly successful in developing mathematical models which  model curious aspects of more concrete reality.

Nevertheless, mathematics is not dependent on this physical word, but have a reality and validity of their own, depending on clarity, consistency and completeness. It is indeed amazing that bizarre  mathematical objects and their equally curious relationships have been found to model the behaviour of, say the fundamental particles of quantum mechanics. Nonetheless, the investigation and discovery of the maths often pre-dated, and are therefore independent of the physics. It shouldn’t have to be said that physics doesn’t deal with or exhaust all reality. There may be a dependence but it is not clear what the nature or direction of this relationship is.

Logic is another abstract realm, not obviously dependent on other aspects of reality. Logic is historically based on figuring out how one statement implies or excludes another. It was once thought it would possible to show that all of maths, or at least number theory, could be derived from logic, ultimately the law of the excluded middle. This says it is not possible to hold that X and not-X are both true. Of course, you can add qualifications to the X on either side to make this seem plausible, but in the bald case, if you say X and not-X at the same time, the result is you are saying nothing. This logical enterprise was not successful but a whole new world of formal, or mathematical, logic was opened up, much of it forming the basis of information theory. Interestingly, progress in IT has often been by way of finding effective and efficient physical models of the abstract findings of mathematical logic - the opposite of what has been the case with physics.

Mathematics and logic, therefore involve grappling with an abstract realm reflecting upon and related to, but not dependent upon, activities of counting, measuring, comparing, reasoning, etc within a rich set of well-grounded traditions passed on in schools, universities, professional bodies professions jobs and enthusiasts.