Michael Langford

Michael Langford interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 21st September 2015

0:05:06 Born in Chiswick, London, in 1931; my father was a doctor from a nouveau riche Manchester family; his father drank himself to death at the age of seventy; my father was brought up in the lap of luxury, but my mother was brought up in rough circumstances; her father had been an Anglican priest who left the Church of England and became a Unitarian minister; he was an early member of the Labour Party; my mother was brought up in Wales and won one of the first ever scholarships to Cambridge from a little local school, and went up to Newnham as a history scholar; she then went to do a Dip.Ed at Manchester and there met my father; my father was a lovely man but not an academic at all like my mother was; after my mother was widowed she became a genealogist and researched the Langfords back to farmers in Herefordshire in the mid-eighteenth century; another line were farmers called Dixon in Northumberland; on my mother's side there was an intellectual streak of very interesting Naval surgeons at Plymouth, one of whom, George Bellamy, fought at the Battle of the Nile; his notebooks are at present being looked at the University Library here because of their great interest; he lived until 1863 and died in his nineties; I have his family silver

2:30:16 My early childhood was happy until war broke out; I was sent to a horrid little prep school which fortunately I was saved from by the outbreak of war; it was called Gunnersbury, in Chiswick, and it was an awful place; when war broke out we all went to my uncle's at Presteigne on the Herefordshire-Radnorshire border; I remember sitting in a circle on September 3rd and listening to Joseph Chamberlain announcing the beginning of the war and my parents looking very grave; for the year that we were there, there was no schooling; my father went back to London and was a doctor in the blitz; then I was sent to a lovely coeducational prep school called the Froebel where I was until I was twelve, and that was a boarding school; I then went to St Paul's, the London day school but for a year I was boarding; I hated that as I was very homesick; it was a bit brutal but very good educationally; then I was a day boy from the age of fourteen; my passion was chemistry; there was an excellent chemistry master; I still remember the maths teacher when I was fourteen, being introduced to calculus by Mr Mokes; I remember to this day he put on the board a curved surface, then little boxes, and the idea of an infinite number of little boxes, and the idea of differential calculus and its invention, as we then believed by Leibniz or Newton, although I think we now have evidence that it was actually Archimedes who came up with it; my first political memory was the abdication of Edward VIII and the other little boys in this horrid school were talking about it; one of them asked if I had heard the shocking news which he said was that they had found the King with bottles of beer under his bed and so he had got to go; I looked very shocked because I couldn't make any sense of it; I told my parents and they laughed and laughed as they realized that somebody hadn't wanted to talk about the reality; I seriously began to read when I was at the Froebel when I was nine; my mother read us Dicken's stories and things like that; my passion was toy soldiers and I also played the violin and began to love music; my soldiers were to some extent part of the British Empire as I was quite jingoistic in those days, and I was always the good king and my younger brother was always the bad king who had to get defeated; my older sister was nowhere around; at that time I only played a little bit of tennis; at the Froebel we had desultory games except for netball, and I was the only boy in the team; we used to go to other prep school, mostly all girls, and as the only boy I felt terribly embarrassed; when I got to St Paul's they assumed that you had been at a prep school where you had been properly taught; I loved cricket and had quite a good eye, but I hadn't got the background

7:06:05 I was interested in the debating society; we had the Union which went back to about 1830 where we had quite serious debates, particularly in the eighth form (sixth in most places); I made a lot of close friends, nearly all chemists; in my last year I was very tied up with the Christian Fellowship which was very unusual; school Christian Fellowships tend to be very evangelical and this was very liberal, run by a group of enthusiastic Old Paulines who had learnt Darwinism and all the rest of it; my family were not church-going, my father was very anti-clerical, but that triggered my desire to be ordained, a reflection of revolt of the next generation; of my two daughters, one has kept her faith but one is agnostic, and you tend to get this extraordinary switch; I loved my father, he was a great man, but I rebelled; he wasn't actually an atheist but he had no time for church Christianity; my mother was sympathetic-agnostic, but later in life, after I was ordained, she went back to the church; she was a lovely, very human person, an excellent Magistrate, particularly working with juveniles; she kept up her intellectual interests all her life; I was Confirmed in my last year or so at school; most of the children were Confirmed at twelve or thirteen in a kind of ritualistic, rather meaningless way; the school Chaplain, Chris Heath, was a very respected maths teacher, and he was a considerable help to me; mine was not a sudden religious awakening; I was attracted by the community of people who were genuinely concerned, where there was an enormous sense of warmth; that led me to read Christianity, particularly in the liberal tradition, very differently; it was a little before C.S. Lewis but he was just coming on the market, and there was Dorothy Sayers - 'The Man Born to be King', I remember - and other things like that; during my military service - I had very foolishly volunteered for the Korean Front; they forced me to switch from the infantry to the artillery at the officers training selection because of my mathematics; I had got to Oxford on maths, additional maths, physics and chemistry, so I became a subaltern in the Royal Artillery; just by luck I was kept in Japan training troops with one visit to the front line, carrying despatches; one of my friends was killed by a shell; with hindsight I wouldn't have volunteered because although I am not a pacifist I think that Syngman Rhee and the South Korean team was not something I would necessarily want to lay down my life for; I take a much more negative view of war now than I did then

11:13:14 This was before I went to Oxford; it was during that time that I decided that four years chemistry wouldn't make as much sense as three years PPE if I was going to be ordained; on my first day back at New College I went to see Mr Staveley the chemistry tutor and explained; he was very flexible and allowed me to switch to PPE which nowadays he wouldn't be allowed to do, but given the context, that I was now twenty and had done military service, they allowed it; I do have memories of Japan at that time; when I was taking troops up into the mountains to get fit having just come off a troop ship, I remember seeing a Japanese peasant walking along and ten yards behind, his wife loaded up with sticks, and thinking what a strange world this was; I got to know quite a lot of Japanese people; I was fire officer in the camp and we had a fire engine run by Japanese people, so I got to know them this way; on one occasion when I was orderly officer one of the Japanese servants was caught thieving; immediately I put him in a jeep and took him to the local police station, and he was absolutely terrified; the next morning I was summoned before the C.O. and Adjutant and given a terrible bollocking because I was meant to have kept him on campus to be interviewed by our R.C.M.P.; afterwards I found that they were laughing because my action had been far more effective; I learnt a little Japanese, and quite a bit more when I went back in 1977 to practice aikido in Tokyo; I was being taught to drive in my spare time and we used to drive to Hiroshima, and I saw the consequences of the Hiroshima bombing; I didn't physically see anything else, and the Japanese were amazingly friendly and forgiving given what had happened to them and the atrocities of the war; I went to Tokyo once but didn't see the destruction; I have always found the Japanese easy to relate to; I know that there are subjects to keep off like the Nanjing massacre and the occupation of China; they are very strange people in some ways; their sense of what is proper and their sense of humour is just so different from ours; particularly when I went back the second time as a gaijin, I was often invited into peoples homes; I remember sitting in one home being shown a lot of Samurai swords, being waited upon by the wife and daughter, and he said I should not think that this was how they normally lived, but because I was a guest they were behaving in the traditional style; he said that his men friends did not come to the house as he entertained them at the local pub

15:17:00 I went to Oxford as I knew from my school teachers that if you wanted to do chemistry, Oxford was the place to go; I did not want to do physics and chemistry which I would have done at Cambridge; I chose New College because I thought it looked beautiful; later I came to love it, particularly because of the music tradition there; I played in Professor Westrup's orchestra in the first violins, played in two quartets, and spent far more time making music than I should have done; I played a little bit of cricket for the second eleven, a bit of rugby, and generally had a good time; I didn't work very hard I am afraid; I knew a few girls and I sat next to one of them at the orchestra whom I rather fancied, but they were few and far between; this was between 1951 and 1954; I did not do any debating; I have always found public speaking rather fun so had I wanted to go into politics, which is something which in hindsight I was rather interested in, though as a Liberal I would not have made much mark, the Union was the way to do that; I had a fairly active social life and a lot of friends, a drinking dining society, and helped run a youth club, as well as two orchestras, a quartet, and some sport, and that was it; I had marvellous tutors starting with Herbert Hart; he was a strange man but I got on very well with him because he taught me symbolic logic; having done maths and additional maths I found no difficulty with it but many of the other fifteen people doing PPE with me found it rather heavy going; then he became Professor of Jurisprudence and under the arcane rules of Oxford wasn't allowed to teach undergraduates; then I started philosophy proper, and five of my papers were in philosophy including political philosophy, and I was farmed out to Isaiah Berlin, a fascinating experience; I would go normally on my own to All Souls and he would sit and talk and ask questions occasionally; I would read him a paper; he was very friendly and nice but I was far too naive to appreciate what was going on; I remember one supervision when we were talking about the philosophy of history; he said that of course I knew all about Ranke, but I didn't and had to go up and read about him; the whole question of the nature of historical thought and historiography, I was so naive I didn't know who this chap was; Stephen Leacock used to say that if you go to Oxford for three years you are smoked at and come out differently, and I suppose I did; I occasionally went to Berlin's lectures which were just performances, particularly on people like Saint Simon and Comte; I was very lucky because he wasn't in the normal Oxford mode; he knew his analytic philosophy but he was far more broad ranging in his views than that; my other tutor later on teaching me logic was Stuart Hampshire; he again came with a very nice manner; I remember one particular supervision sitting in the garden with him, and we got onto the subject of theology and linguistic theory; I said that his position depended on a particular theory of language which was quite different from A.J. Ayers of 1936, and that in fifty years there would be another theory of language; he looked at me and said my remark was very cynical; I admired him particularly for his writings but I always thought that it was not an adequate reply; I got the impression that he thought that Oxford analytical philosophy was there to stay, which it may be of course; certainly it will be there as an element but as an over-arching adequate model I doubt that; as before mentioned, I would read essays to Isaiah Berlin; when I have supervised at Cambridge, I have had the essay beforehand, so I have saved half the time, listening to all this garbage and picking up things; having read it before I could say that doesn't work; at Oxford that was the universal system; you would read the essay and often he would wait until the end before coming out with his fire, fully justified; I only had Michael Dummett for two or three supervisions when Berlin wasn't available; he was not a good supervisor at that level as he was far too abstract; I was with another student in these supervisions and I remember asking about primary and secondary qualities in Locke and he went into some long things that we didn't follow; I did two papers in economics with Peter Wiles, a fascinating man who I got on very well with, and visited later on when he was a professor at L.S.E.; his speciality was Russian economics and he used to amuse us by telling us how Stalin would tell him the result of the great survey, and his economists would come up and cook the result; he was able to document this; I didn't do any work for him unfortunately; then I had Herbert Nicholas as politics tutor, and I kept up with him until his death and went to his funeral; he was one of my referees as I got on particularly well with him; I did De Tocqueville with him, and a paper on American political theory, and one on general political theory which was really political philosophy; I was most interested in philosophy because I thought it a better background for ordination, and I just got hooked on it; I didn't know at that time that I was going to be a professional philosopher

23:09:12 I was a member of OCU [Oxford Christian], which C.S. Lewis used to speak to, not OICU; the latter’s fundamentalism always appalled me; I went to St Aldate's once and was absolutely horrified; I remember the sermon was on either you were an atheist, which was irrational, or you were agnostic and sitting on the fence, or you were a genuine Christian; this incredibly superficial thing really annoyed me; first of all I think that atheism is a rational position; my objection to Dawkins, for example, is not of atheism, its his irrationalism; just as I wouldn't criticise atheism by saying look at Stalin, so I wouldn't criticise Christianity by saying look at Torquemada; I think atheism is one of the seven or eight rationally tenable positions, and I think liberal theism is another, so I was a member of this much more rational, C.S. Lewis approach; Lewis was a marvellous lecturer and a very funny man as well; I wasn't there for his famous dispute with Elizabeth Anscombe, I missed that unfortunately; she took him to task on some logical point and was reckoned to have won and C.S. Lewis was very upset by it; I didn't know Elizabeth Anscombe but I went to her lectures, and sat in on a number of philosophy conferences where she was speaking and arguing with other people; I didn't take to her I'm afraid, partly because I fundamentally disagree with one of her central claims in philosophy which is that moral obligation is only coherent if you have a theism which gives you someone who gives the obligation; I follow Herbert Hart in thinking that the origin of ethics is in social rules, and when you have those the notion of interior obligation is part of what goes with it; therefore an atheist can feel moral obligation just as much as a Jew or Christian, so that is a fundamental disagreement with Elizabeth Anscombe; I only went to the odd philosophical society meeting; I was too involved in my social life and things like that, and at that point I wasn't thinking of becoming a professional philosopher

26:16:04 I got a 2:1 in finals; had I worked my tutor said I should have got a first, but I was far too idle; then I spent six months in a factory, which was one of things they recommended for someone seeking ordination, this was the Bristol Aeroplane Company; then I went to Cambridge to do theological training for two years, a course called the C.O.C. which was the equivalent of an undergraduate course but higher powered than G.O.E.; I did that at Westcott House; then I was ordained; I was taught by Robert Runcie and John Habgood, among other people, so I was very lucky; I went to lectures in the Divinity Faculty - Charlie Moule, in particular, who was a marvellous lecturer; Robert Runcie was an extraordinarily humane person and I was very sorry when he went off and became Dean of Trinity Hall and I wasn't taught by him any more; he taught me Old Testament in a most brilliant way, and I got a series of A's in all the classes he taught me; then John Habgood came who had been a Fellow of King's in biology; he started as an evangelical and gradually got more, as I would call, rational; he was a brilliant lecturer as well; Ken Carey was not an intellectual but a very fine spiritual person who headed the College; it was two years of very good training for the professional ministry; I have two main problems with evangelicals; one is the substitution theory of atonement which I think is a caricature and means that a lot of more rational people looking at Christianity are put off it; the idea that the explanation of why Jesus died is that he thereby paid the penalty which you and I ought to pay, and that he was the substitute; I take a much more Abelardian point of view that we are so drawn to this life as it should be that we enter another level of living; it is the power of persuasion, as Whitehead used to say - God works by persuasion when properly understood; this respects human dignity, and also a more Platonic approach of being caught up in the community; the idea is a kind of judicial thing, that there is that penalty you can't pay and Jesus paid it by blood, as metaphor it is powerful, but when it is taken literally, that is one of my objections; the other is verbal inspiration; if God dictated the Book of Joshua then God becomes very unpleasant, ordering the slaughter of women and children; I was delighted to discover that this more liberal view was right there in the second and third century, with people like Oregon, who didn't take this literalist view; it is much more since the Reformation that we have had that view; the same goes for Islam which is still stuck with this, because even relatively liberal Muslims tend to believe that the Koran is literally dictated through Gabriel by God, including that hands and feet should be cut off and things like that; liberal Islam has to get away from that as liberal Christianity has; I think it can in the long run; I have already met liberal Muslims who are faithful to the mainstream tradition but want to distance the core Koran from the social Koran, but they have to be careful where and how they say this; I think that Islam can have a liberal version which can overcome this huge problem; I have written about the problem of God being all-powerful yet the world is full of pain; I take what I think is an implication of Aquinas that I don't believe that God can do whatever he likes; Aquinas is very clear, and that is why I much prefer him to Calvin, that when we talk about omnipotence there are two particular limitation; one is the nature of goodness, the other the law of non contradiction; to produce something like our species that has this essential autonomy there are only certain things that a God could do; therefore, although God could make many possible worlds he couldn't make any possible world; where there are multiple universes, which I doubt, this is only one of the possible ones if our kind of love is going to be there; so there had to be fragility, there has to be danger, there has to be risk, and there has to be not only humans who make their own decisions, but an ordered world; this is Aquinas again, in this case on primary and secondary causality, what he called proximate causality; so the tree falls down because the wind blew and it was rotten, not as in Calvin, because God determined it would, God set up an order of that kind; I go further and say that unless he set up an order that was autonomous, the kind of love and responsibility which we have couldn't be there; to summarize this, I think that many religious people, many Christians included tend to think of religion and prayer as a God who will manipulate the world to suit us; I think of religion as being in touch with the spiritual reality which will change us; and then comes the paradox, because if we are changed then the world gets changed; particularly with things like psychosomatic medicine and other things, when I read the New Testament I'm inclined to believe that most of the things there really happened - I am not a literalist, but it doesn't demand a miracle in the old-fashioned sense, the Humean sense of God changing nature, but what happens when people walk in tune with nature; my father had no time for religion but he mentioned that he had one cancer patient who spontaneously cured; well if people are walking psychologically in tune with the way they are meant to be, that will happen far more often; I don't rule out the possibility of miracles; when Hume said you couldn't use miracles to prove God, he was right; but if you believe in a God, sometimes you might think there might be miracles, so I go the other way round; in the case of water into wine in St John's Gospel, which is very different from the Synoptics and much more a case of symbolism, I am not totally committed to the view that it couldn't have happened but I tend to take it as a symbolic occurrence; there was a beautiful set of lectures in the Divinity Faculty recently talking about how the New Testament writers were using the Septuagint; there is one passage where it talks about someone walking on the shore and how it appeared to be on the water, so I am agnostic again; I don't deny the possibility of the theist that there might be some extraordinary kinetic power to walk on water, but I'm not going to push that and demand that people believe that; I think is could have been some extraordinary memory of Jesus on the beach and then reaching out to him; I don't believe that miracles in the literal sense are essential for Christianity, with the possible exception of the Resurrection and that brings in special difficulties; Hume talks about what we have observed in nature, it is not what must happen at all; his definition of a miracle as a violation of the law of nature, given what he means about a law of nature, is self-defeating; his main purpose is to argue that you can't use miracles to prove there is a God, and I agree with him on that, but his account of miracles otherwise is very unsatisfactory because he doesn't have an adequate view of causation, it seems to me, therefore his whole account of laws of nature is philosophically flawed; also he says that the miracles of one religion dispute the miracles of another; well what about inter-faith dialogue; I am studying Nicholas of Cusa at the moment; by no means would all the ancient people have argued in that way; I see God as perpetually, continually creative in the spiritual and mental, but not by manipulating sub-atomic particles

29:29:04 After Westcott House I had a two and a half year Curacy in Bristol, which I loved; at that point I intended to be a parish priest all my life; I was with a very gifted parish Priest called Basil Moss, who later became a Provost of Birmingham; I was wondering what to do next when this invitation came to be interviewed at Queens’ College to be their Chaplain; I now know that Henry Hart, a lovely man, had gone to Ken Carey and asked him to recommend some one; so I was interviewed, and was there for four years; I did a bit of teaching in philosophy but not very much; I was running the Chapel and the undergraduate programme and this is where everything got changed around personally; I fell in love with a girl, but after five years she decided to marry somebody else; I realized after this personal disaster, that being a parish priest as a bachelor was just nor on for me; people don't always appreciate how difficult it is for an ordinary full-blooded young man, (or woman now), to carry out their wooing, because if you ask out a girl in the parish and it doesn't come to anything you can do terrible damage in the parish and to her; you have to find your hunting ground, as it were, elsewhere; that can really be very difficult; this girl who I fell in love with was not in the parish, but something quite separate; I knew that bachelor clergy have a problem finding the right partner and that some of them take to the bottle or other things; I was getting more and more interested in philosophy so I thought the academic life may be the one for me; it was particularly tricky for me at the end because they asked me to stay on as a Fellow and to combine it with being Rector of St Botolph's; there was a lovely vicarage in Newnham, living in Queens’ and joining in feasts and everything, so was very tempting; when Arthur Armitage asked me on behalf of the Fellows, I asked for twenty-four hours to think about it; I rejected the offer and said I was going off to be a PhD student; through his good offices, partly, I got a State Scholarship to go to King's College, London, to do a PhD full-time in philosophy; I still wanted to be a priest but I wanted to be a philosopher; I was particularly interesting in the natural law tradition and did my doctoral thesis on Grotius on it and revolutionary thought in the seventeenth century; I was genuinely fascinated by the topic, but there was also the personal thing that I didn't want to be a parish priest as a bachelor; I lived in Hampstead and was Honorary Curate at Hampstead Parish Church; Richard Harries, later Bishop of Oxford, was a very close friend and I was godfather to his daughter; I did the PhD sitting mostly in the British Museum, supervised by H.D. Lewis, and wrote this thesis successfully; then at the end of the three years I was wondering what to do next; I was tired of being desperately poor and there were jobs coming up in Canada and North America (this was in 1966) so I applied; I got a telegram from the first application stating an active interest, partly because one of my referees was Donald MacKinnon, another was Herbert Nicholas, the other was Robert Runcie; I was offered the job of Assistant Professor of Philosophy for a two-year trial period at St John's, Newfoundland; I went for what is probably the wrong reason - I was offered a much better salary that I would have had here and it sounded like fun, and the first two years were tax free; I stayed twenty-nine years, for the right reason, and never tried to move; I loved the place, the people and everything, and I would have retired there had there been work for my wife whom I had met at Harvard when I was a visiting scholar there

44:31:21 When I went out there in 1966-7 the folklorists were going round getting tapes of Dorset as it sounded in the eighteenth century, particularly from Poole; going right back to the fifteen hundreds, about a third of the island was populated from places like Dorset; they were mostly nominally Anglican; another third were Scots from the clearances, and they were Presbyterian and the other third were Irish from the great potato famine; so we had these three major groups, often regionally divided; Newfoundland then as now, there is the city of St John which goes back to about 1520, a fascinating cosmopolitan city about 250,000 if you include the outer regions, and another 250,000 scattered around 2000 out-ports, very primitive, beautiful people but not much education; so you have these two sides, and the university was in St John's; I used to point out to people that it was the oldest city in North America, not counting the aboriginal cities; there are no old building because of three major fires; I love the people, places and everything, and they looked after me very well; I became a full Professor and then became Professor of Bioethics at the Medical School for my last nine years; initially I had nine hours teaching and no individual supervisions until later so it was more like a red-brick university; I would have three hours with an introductory group - it was a 4 year B.A. in philosophy - three hours in a third year class, then three hours seminar with six students doing jurisprudence in their fourth year; like all Canadian university you have got a big range, but the best students were excellent and would have got firsts here, and the worst students wouldn't have been at university at all, and they didn't tend to do philosophy; I have always enjoyed lecturing; I am an Aristotelian and walk up and down, and very rarely use notes; I think people like my lectures; the tradition is that when Aristotle lectured he did walk up and down and that was why he was called the peripatetic philosopher; I was on my second sabbatical and a visiting scholar at Harvard; one of the reasons I wanted to go to Boston was because of my aikido dojo - I have done this martial arts for fifty years - and Kanai Sensei taught there and I wanted to go and upgrade and train with him; it is very difficult to part at this place; I noticed that right opposite the Dojo, as they call it, in Boston there was this Anglican church; so I wrote to the Vicar of St Paul's and asked to use the car park if I came to offer help there as an Anglican priest; Sam Abbot, who had been a Professor of Law at Boston, wrote back and agreed; my first Sunday in Boston I was introduced and put in the pulpit to preach; Sam Abbot said that after the service there would be a parish lunch; I was looking around and saw Sally in the third row, thought she looked nice, and decided that I would sit next to her at lunch; a year later we were married; that was 1984 so we have been married for thirty years now; Sally was finishing her PhD in Chinese literature and history; she had already done the necessary qualifications, she had a Masters at Chicago before and an earned Masters at Harvard; she came to Newfoundland and we had the two babies there; hers was a twelve year PhD - the Harvard PhD is five or six years anyway, because unlike the English PhD's you have got the general examinations, the earned M.A. and all the rest of it - so twelve years was quite common; she finished it and was looking around for work; she twice nearly got prestigious appointments in Canada but it didn't work out; she got a part-time job offer at the Needham Institute and a Fellowship at Wolfson so we moved to Cambridge, and it worked out very well; I would have been happy to stay in Newfoundland, but Cambridge was the next best, and my two girls went to Hills Road Sixth Form College, which is of course an excellent school; we couldn't afford private education so that worked out very well; my wife is 65 now and I am 84; she is still a Fellow of Wolfson and teaches Tang poetry and things like that

50:30:03 I had this extraordinary extra-dimension to life because, having always been interested in wine and being a friend of John Avery the famous wine merchant and Peter Sichel a famous wine person in Bordeaux, when I got to Newfoundland I discovered a terrible nakedness in the land and the wine list for the monopoly was dreadful; so I started a wine club and with the permission of the authorities I imported wine for the club; in 1970 they asked me to be their consultant, so for the next 25 years they sent me at their expense to France or elsewhere, gave me a small fee, and I selected wine for the monopoly's 77 outlets; what happened was that if you start at a terrible situation, everything that you do is good; well the Toronto Globe and Mail, a year later published an article saying what has happened to Newfoundland, they have the best wine list in Canada; so my name was made, and even though normally my job would have changed with political fortunes, every time the Conservatives or Liberals got in I kept this job; so I became a semi-professional wine consultant and I learnt on the job; I was guided by John Avery, so usually in May when I was off I would go to Bordeaux to Burgundy with him; he would be tasting and I would look at his notes, recommend what he recommended; after about 25 years I knew something about it

52:17:02 I published my first book on the concept of providence with the SCM Press in 1981; then I published two more books while I was there and wrote a number of articles, some in the Journal of Bioethics; the one that has been most quoted is 'Who should get the Kidney Machine', and the highlight of my academic career possibly was when I was at a bioethics conference; a woman came up and asked if I was the Langford who wrote that article as her thesis was showing how wrong I was; I thought, great, because the point of an article is to get a debate going; she was a bit startled by my reply; we argued about it and I stuck to my guns because I was arguing that although a prognosis should be the fundamental criterion, you have to treat people also with the notion of irreplaceability; that a mother with young children was in a different category to a bachelor if both had a similar diagnosis with a kidney, and that the mother with young children should have them; therefore although prognosis was number one it was more complicated than that, but I admitted that this was exceedingly dangerous because at a similar time a Canadian Senator had been given a rare organ and it looks as if he jumped the queue; Senators are not irreplaceable, nor are captains of industry but I was arguing that mothers are; but what do you mean by irreplaceability was what I was talking about; that is my most important article that I have ever published; I have talked a lot about designer babies, and there is a valid distinction between correction and enhancement; when you get something like muscular dystrophy where there is probably a single gene, I don't have any moral problem with replacing it, or mitochondrial disease where there is not a single gene but a tiny selection, because there the alternative is to force hundreds or thousands of children to die unnecessarily; I think enhancement where you try to improve IQ or something is much more tricky; I am not saying never, but I would certainly not want to licence that at the moment; at the moment, most of the plans are for Huntingtons chorea and things like that where there is a clear defect, and I don't have a problem with genetic engineering in that context; I was very annoyed with my own Anglican Church and the Catholic Church when they tried to prevent the mitochondrial response, and my friend Richard Harries, of course a fellow Anglican, shared my view; they kept asking for more and more study; we don't in this particular case need more study; designer babies is an ambiguous term; if you mean removing muscular dystrophy then I am for it; my main worry in the long run is not so much that there may be a case for doing some things, improving our spines or knees, but the political power which it would give to some groups to design for political or other reasons; that to me is much more scary; bringing in a third parent, if it is to do a correction then I don't have a problem with it; I think it is misleading to call it three parents; I have a problem with IVF though I am not against it, because for some people fertility is a huge emotional and spiritual problem, and if you can overcome it our humanity calls us to find ways to do it; I think there is a price to be paid; when we interfere with nature there are sometimes more costs than we realize; when you prevent the race of the sperm down the birth channel and you select sperm, you are doing a short cut; we don't know the full consequences and I think there is evidence that when you use artificial means you get a slightly higher proportion of problems; that doesn't mean to me that you should never do it, but I am very cautious, particularly I should prefer to let the sperm do the natural race because nature in the long run often knows what's best; this is one of my problems with people who take an extreme view on abortion; I think from what I have seen in papers is that something like 70% of embryos are naturally aborted, sometimes at a very early stage so they don't know, and I think the evidence is that it is usually for a good reason; now if we take an absolutist view and can start preventing that we shall in some way be fighting against the natural system of rejecting problematic embryos; as a Christian I tend to think that abortion that is deliberate, particularly when it is not rape of something, is morally highly questionable, but I don't think that it is the job of the law to enforce that; there is a crucial distinction between the morality of law and that of personal ethics; I think that, particularly prior to 24 weeks, the law ought to be liberal and allow the woman to choose; one of my reasons is that in the Rabbinic tradition there is no one overall rule, but the general view of Rabbis is that it is appropriate to talk about the embryo being a person at the time of viability; their language is very careful; they don't talk about the infusion of a soul, whereas in the Catholic tradition you are a person from the moment of conception; now these are two equally supportable philosophical religious positions, and if you don't allow abortion at all as in Nicaragua and Malta, then what is effectively a Catholic theology is being imposed on an equally rational sincerely held Rabbinic theology; Rabbis don't like abortion but it is for good reasons that it is permitted in the first 24 weeks, and that seems to me a much sounder argument; when it comes to the law my ethical position is very liberal, whether I should counsel someone I am more conservative; I think particularly for reasons of personal convenience to abort what is at least a potential human being worries me a lot; speaking personally, our first child was conceived when my wife was thirty-five and the law in Canada is that you must be offered amniocentesis at that age; Sally and I agonised over this and we decided that if we had a Downs syndrome baby we would not be happy with aborting it, so we rejected amniocentesis because of the risk associated with it; we also made another decision that if we did by misfortune have a Downs syndrome child, the next time we would; I have known many families who have had a Downs syndrome child and the siblings rally round, so although it is a disaster it is a creative disaster, but I have known one with two and that was an unmitigated disaster; I have a bit of a fudge here, but "Lead us not into temptation.." for me is a way of saying "may I not be tested beyond that I can endure"

1:01:41:12 On the positive side I do find evangelicals have a marvellous warmth and enthusiasm, many of them live very good lives and I feel at one with them when they are doing some of their worship and their love of being disciples of Jesus; however, intellectually, I have mentioned two problems but there is a third, that if there is a God who is going to be in some sense our judge, that he is overly concerned with what we happen to believe, because that is so much happenstance; I take the view that is really that of Oregon that when Jesus said "no one come to the Father but by me", the me is the logos, is the way God comes to people in the good, the true and the beautiful; therefore what does matter for every individual in terms of their spiritual growth, salvation, if there is a future life, that too, is how they responded to Plato's trinity, the moral good, beautiful - the aesthetic good, the true - scientific and historical truth, how people have responded to that; the huge claim of Christianity is that the Word, which is all these three, was incarnate in a particular life; that is a unique claim which I as a fairly orthodox Christian claim; that means that exactly what you believe is very secondary, whether you have responded to the good, true and beautiful, as an atheist, Buddhist or Christian is what matters; if you are someone who has tortured people and claim to have responded to the good, true and beautiful, however much you are a Pope, Cardinal or anything, it won't help you much; I think this is a way in which I can combine a genuinely religious view of life, rooted by what I see in the Old Testament with the rejection of a certain stream of evangelical preaching; I think it is important to try and have right beliefs because in the long run, truth matters, but that people will be judged because they happen to have wrong beliefs, that just seems to me to be weird; in this I am not original, it is what I read into Oregon in the third century; the idea that anyone who does not believe in Jesus is damned is a Calvinist tradition; in the Arminian tradition, which is a much more liberal form of Calvinism, and my PhD was on Grotius, and he was an Arminian; and in the Catholic tradition, in practice an awful lot of spiritual advisers have been much more liberal about this and have managed to sneak all kinds of people into heaven who weren't Catholics or even Christian; I think this is a much sharper criticism of a certain kind of evangelical Protestantism; Protestantism has quite a lot going for it, that the priesthood is all believers and the individualism which we need, but it also has a lot to answer for

1:06:19:22 On the power of God, if there is this infinitely powerful mind, or infinite meaning as it is logically possible to be, and you try to make a universe in which something like our love and responsibility can come, there are much more strict limitation than their might be; I suspect that many aspects of the universe are not choices; I am not saying God couldn't make another universe, but it might be surprisingly similar if it were to produce beings like us; if it were just to produce light and heat, that is another matter, but if the purpose of the universe is to bring forth joy and self-knowledge and love - this is where my Humanist friends and I are very often on the same band-wagon; they think that there is something extraordinary and transcendent, though they may not like that word, about the emergence of love, particularly at the human level though I am not excluding it from the higher mammals as well; to me the weakness of Humanism is that it has this huge sensitivity to the overarching importance but doesn't have a philosophy that can give it an adequate grounding; that is my main critique of secular materialism; you need a philosophy that is adequate for the burden that you want to put upon it; so if you are having a doctrine of human rights you need some doctrine of what it is to be a person, what it is to have a right, what it is for someone to be ethical that can bear the weight of making this really important; Herbert Hart was a secularist, but one of the features of the moral law for him was this importance, and I don't think he dug deep enough into this; it is not only that you have to feel it is important but you have to feel it is really important; in most secular systems the humanity is too ephemeral, too chancy, to have this weight; this is not a logical proof, and I want something adequate for the weight that it has to bear upon it; I don't think either theism or atheism can be logically demonstrated one way or the other, they can be more or less coherent; as mentioned earlier, I think there are at least seven or eight possible coherent overall philosophies and you have to weigh them rationally by their overall consistency not by a demonstration that this is the only right one; the other possibilities are agnosticism, some form of monism, and some form of logical positivism, which are all coherently defendable

1:10:05:20 John Polkinghorne would say that he is fundamentally a mathematician who is into physics, and he never claims to be a great theologian but is fascinated by theology, trying to apply the insights he has had as a very fine physical mathematician to theology; I see no conflict between science and religion when they are properly understood; I think psychologically there is; scientism is the claim that science is omnicompetent which some of the Enlightenment people believed, but that seems to me a distinction from science because scientism is the claim that scientific methodology is the method in all fields; quite apart from theology, it seems to me inadequate for history, for literature, for music; one of the troubles is saying here is physics and here is theology, but is it often much healthier to say let's look at poetry, history, other things; the canons of rationality here are quite important, and to some extent can be spelled out, but they are not the same as in physics where you have the experimental method, repeatability, and all the other things; theology and metaphysics have much in common with these other intellectual disciplines; one of the things that I am interested in is trying to spell out what we mean by rationality; my trouble with Dawkins, although I respect him and do not object to him being an atheist, is that I think there is a fundamental irrationality; when he talked to my friend Keith Ward who was Professor of Divinity, he said that he was not really a Christian, or something to that effect, because he wants to attack the caricature; I feel much the same about Marxism; Marx in its crude forms can easily be dismembered, but there are Marxists who have a much more subtle version of Marxism; I am still not at ease with it but I don't think I can disprove it; there are several ways in which Dawkins caricatures and distorts the thing that he is attacking; I give you one example; he says the church early on arbitrarily chose these four gospels; this is simply unhistorical because the four gospels we have we know from the Chester Beatty and Martin Bodmer papyri were all around in the first century - we have papyrus from about 125 A.D.; the so-called Gnostic Gospels, which are very interesting and important, with one possible exception are second, third or fourth century - the Gospel of Thomas is an interesting special case; so the four gospels were chosen because as far as we know they were the apostolic ones which were written within memory; it doesn't mean that the others are nonsense, and the church can be justly criticised for suppressing them when they should have been fascinating literature; on another occasion he treats metaphysics as if it were an empirical hypothesis; there is a hypothesis of a general kind, can I think of the life as if there were a God and try and live that way, as a kind of a hypothesis; but this is not an empirical hypothesis which can be tested and falsified; therefore, although theology and philosophy in many ways has rational criteria, they are not empirical hypotheses; he says that you shouldn't believe anything without evidence, and he's quite right, but he doesn't say what he means by evidence; in metaphysics you mean how you interpret the whole, in physics, how you interpret this, so it is incredibly loose when it comes to the great throwaway, I only believe what the evidence will show me; of course he is right, but then the subtle question is what do you count as evidence in these different spheres; I find when he gets to metaphysics he is bizarre; I have been back in Cambridge for nineteen years and I have been teaching sometimes for the Medical Faculty, sometime in philosophy, but mostly in the Divinity Faculty; I am a bit of a fraud as I have no degrees in divinity though I did a two year graduate course, but they don't seem to mind too much; I am a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, but teach in divinity, and I was examining PhDs and tutoring, but not any more; I still supervise and give some lectures on bioethics, ethics and the philosophy of religion; I gave the introduction to metaphysics lectures three years ago when someone was on sabbatical; one thing that I haven't expressed is how two people have inspired me, Johann Sebastian Bach and Franz Schubert, in their quite different ways; from the age of eleven or twelve they have been the spiritual source of energy, and I don't think that is unconnected with the rest of my life; I am not a person who has mystical experiences, but sometimes with them I feel lifted into another transcendent dimension and that helps to explain what makes my tick