Review: West Side Story, Hungarian State Opera

West Side Story
Hungarian State Opera, Erkel Theatre

3/5

West Side Story is dominated by two themes, both of them as recognisable and as powerful now as they were in 1957: love, and racial tensions. Racial tensions are particularly salient in the wake of the Syrian Refugees crisis, so what would be the reaction to such a politically charged musical, at a theatre less than ten minutes' walk from the very epicentre of the crisis?

Keleti Palyaudvar, one of Budapest's main railway stations: left, on 1st September 2015, right, on 26th September 2015. Left photo from the Evening Standard.

If you want an answer, I'd suggest asking someone who speaks Hungarian. Since I speak perhaps two dozen words of it at most, my review shall focus on the music, drama and staging of the performance.

The Erkel Theatre is unquestionably ugly. By contrast with the State Opera House, which is an ornate and elaborate declaration of the power and grandeur of the 19th-century Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Erkel Theatre is a shell of wood painted in brutalist colours. This doesn't matter too much during a musical, since your attention is on the stage, but it makes a bad first impression.

The scenery was similarly sparsely decorated. There was no particular background; merely a set of blocks which were used interchangeably as balconies and as platforms to separate the singers from the dancers, a table, and a rather grubby mirror which was lowered over the stage from time to time. The director alone knows why, since the aforementioned grubbiness of the mirror made it near-useless as a reflective surface.

To top off the soviet nature of the stage, the screen used to display Hungarian translations of the songs was a petty little thing, a board with dim-orange lights that would have been much more appropriately placed at a bus stop.

From some Hungarian website or other. The blue stuff is - I think - painted wood,
though going by appearance it may as well be concrete.

With that said, the lighting was fine - not having much of a clue about this matter, this is the highest praise I am ever able to give - and the costumes were used well. Whereas an American performance of West Side Story would typically use Hispanic actors, if not actual Puerto Ricans, to play the Sharks, and a British performance might struggle for Hispanics but would have no difficulty finding enough skilled actors of ethnic minorities to make up half a cast, this performance used costume to separate the groups. Hence the Jets wore chavvy clothing with a white-and-black theme, while the Sharks' garb was colourful verging on the flamboyant. An easy way for the audience to tell the gangs apart, although it made a mockery of Riff's instruction that, when challenging their rivals, the Jets should dress "sweet and sharp".

Sergeant Krupke patrols in front of the Jets. This, and all following photos, are
taken from the official website.

The orchestra was good - not up to the standard of the Hallé Orchestra, perhaps, but generally competent and with enough confidence to inject their own character at parts - holding longer onto the brief cello solo in "Tonight", for example.

Unfortunately the size of the theatre meant that, at least for those of us sitting near the back, the key advantage of live orchestral music was missing: one could not pick out the different parts and explore the subtleties, since the sound of the orchestra came as a single impression rather than a melange of different ones.

It's sometimes said that people lose their accents when singing, and had you told me that a couple of weeks ago I might have believed you. The actors on stage didn't; not one of them, for example, could pronounce the letter w. This wasn't too much of a problem during the solos, but it did sometimes impede clarity when there were groups singing.

While none of the singers could have been confused for a native speaker of English, the people playing Tony and Anita were at least fluent enough to emphasise certain words above others, and to do so intelligently - to inject that large amount of communication which comes from things other than our exact words and body language. The rendition of "A boy like that" was genuinely the finest I heard, beating even that of the seminal West Side Story album released last year by Michael Tilson-Thomas and the San Fransisco Symphony.

Perhaps it's unfair of me to criticise their accents - after all, singing in a Hungarian accent may well have been more clear for most of the audience (though not for me personally). What I do feel ought to be criticised is the gross overuse of vibrato, which seemed to pop up in every note which could possibly sustain it. Vibrato sounds silly when used to this extent, and ought to be saved for those notes which really must be held on to.

The dancing was another thing that, not being qualified to offer even basic commentary on, I shall have to report as merely "fine". It was, though, rather odd to see Tony dancing with Bernardo and Riff even after the latter two had been fatally stabbed.

Tony (centre) stabs Bernardo (right), to avenge Riff (left).

Overall the evening was worth seeing, especially given that tickets start at the bargain price of 300Ft (about £0.70) and spiral up to the heady heights of 3500Ft (about £9). For someone who has been in love with West Side Story for several years but had never seen it live, though, it was something of a let-down: I could have tolerated poor playing of the music, having heard it all at least fifty times before, but the performance offered little, dancing aside, to improve upon just staying at home and listening to Spotify.

A Quick Thought on Hassoun and Autonomy

I'm part-way through listening to the New Books in Philosophy interview with Nicole Hassoun, in which she discusses her book on Global Justice. One claim she makes is that people subject to coercive institutions ought to be in a position to consent (or not consent, for that matter) to these institutions. In order to meaningfully consent, she says, they must be autonomous - which requires that they already possess various basic goods such as healthcare.

The first sentence seems sensible enough. The second worries me somewhat. Suppose I pick up a stone and attempt to skim it across a lake. I am, in a sense, behaving coercively towards the stone. I am taking control of it for my own ends, and not paying any attention at all to whether the stone might like this or not. This is not, however, something we take to be immoral. Stones are incapable of autonomy.

Suppose it were in some way possible to give the stone a form of agency, so that it might or might not consent to my skimming it. Would I be obliged to do this and to actually obtain consent before skimming it? Surely not. Why, then, might we be required to ensure that other people are autonomous in Hassoun's sense before we interact with them?

There's an obvious, gaping worry with what I'm saying. I seem to be suggesting that it may be acceptable to treat people as objects. I think that there are two ways for me to resist this, both of which are entirely comfortable positions, compatible with each other, and both of which display a great deal more respect for the people of the third world than Hassoun's account.

The first is to object that people in general already are autonomous. Perhaps not as autonomous as we might wish, but nevertheless capable of making their own choices, trades and sacrifices. They do not need a white knight to come in and make them autonomous with provision of free healthcare and education.

The second is to suggest that, even when people fail to be (to use a piece of philosophical jargon) "persons", possessing a morally important type of autonomy, there are still limits to what may be done to them - perhaps not that much less stringent than the limits on what may be done to persons. This is hardly an unusual position - after all, without such a view it is hard to explain how children and the severely mentally ill have rights.

In sum, I'm highly sceptical of the idea that, in order to obtain valid consent from all people for coercive institutions, it is necessary to bring them up to a particular level of autonomy.

NB: It is not my aim to defend third world states. The coercive institutions I have in mind to defend are those of global capitalism, those institutions which say "This car is mine, and if you try to take it from me then I have the right to use violence in order to keep it in my possession."

NB2: As mentioned, I have not read Hassoun's book and I am only part way through the podcast. It is possible that I have misrepresented Hassoun's position, in which case I can only apologise and note that it is not my intention to do so.

Is morality part of wellbeing?

In ethics, there is a common view that part of human wellbeing includes being a morally upright person. This is a rough sketch of an argument against this thesis. I'm not certain how much weight to give to my argument, but it seems to be worth recording.

The thesis I am attacking is closely related to internalism about moral motivation (the view that moral beliefs are inherently motivating). Indeed, perhaps they are the same thing. I don't know enough about the subject to know, so for the purposes of this essay I shall refer to my target as "morality as a constituent of wellbeing", or MCW.


P1: If MCW is true, then attempting to cause other people to act morally is paternalistic.
P2: In general, it is impermissible to be paternalistic to other people.
L1: If MCW is true, then in general it is impermissible to attempt to cause other people to act morally.
P3: It is not in general impermissible to attempt to cause other people to act morally.
C: Hence, MCW is false.

P1 I'm uncertain about. Is paternalism confined to forcing people to act in a way that you regard as good for them, or can it apply to a wider range of cases where you privilege your own reasoning over some else's?

P2 seems right. My position is that paternalism is usually wrong except in cases where the patient is incapable of acting rationally, or in accordance with their own considered judgement.
One response might be that by acting immorally, and therefore (according to the defender of MCW) irrationally, people demonstrate that they fall into the "incapable of acting rationally" category. But this seems highly dubious. Most obviously, the fact that someone chooses to act irrationally does not mean that they couldn't have acted rationally.

L1 follows from P1 and P2.

P3 seems sensible. In the words of Leah Libresco, "Breaking a promise is a betrayal, but walking with your friend or partner into evil isn’t loyalty." We rely on our friends and family to keep us on the straight and narrow.

One possible intervention, which could come on either side of the debate, is Joseph Heath's idea that self-binding is one of the crucial "benefits of co-operation". I can see this being used to argue in favour of P3; on the other hand, I can also see it being used to argue that forcing others to act morally isn't really about paternalism.

Response to Dylan Matthews on EA and X-Risk

Dylan Matthews wrote a review of EA Global Berkeley on Vox.com, complaining that too much attention was paid to existential risk concerns - and in particular to concerns about artificial intelligence - and not enough to global poverty eradication. I was not at the weekend, so I have particular reason to doubt his lived experience of the conference. That said, as a fellow Effective Altruist and having listened to the first couple of sessions of the weekend before they disappeared from Youtube, I feel that I am in a position to respond to him. This is not intended to be hostile, but I think there are some fairly serious problems with his piece and since no-one is especially likely to read this, I feel no particular need to be gentle.

In the beginning, EA was mostly about fighting global poverty.

This is true in the sense that the term "Effective Altruism" came out of a philosophical tradition in which the key figures are Peter Singer and Toby Ord, a tradition which has tended to be highly concerned about global poverty. However, as Will MacAskill noted in his opening speech at the weekend, the modern EA movement comes from at least three different strands of people. There were those inspired by Singer, but there were also rich philanthropists - most notably Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld - who separately thought that they should look for effectiveness when "buying their philanthropy". There were also people around what is now MIRI, who were making arguments which have now become mainstays in the study of existential risk. Global poverty has always been a consideration of EA, but to find a time when there were movement leaders concerned about poverty but not about X-risk requires you to go back to before there was any single group recognisable as the modern EA movement.

Declaring that global poverty is a "rounding error" and everyone really ought to be doing computer science research is a great way to ensure that the movement remains dangerously homogenous and, ultimately, irrelevant.

If this is were being said to the general public as a key message of EA, I would agree. Indeed, I've previously made a very similar argument that, regardless of what is actually the most useful cause, third-world poverty is relatively non-weird and a very good cause to talk about when introducing new people to EA.

But this is not what we say to outsiders. In my experience, Sam (the founding president of Giving What We Can: Manchester) and I have occasionally mentioned AI risk to the unitiated because it's sexy and exciting, but the bread and butter of our outreach has always been third-world poverty. The TED talk that we point people to is Peter Singer's rather than Robin Hanson's. There have been some articles about AI risk in mainstream media, but to the best of my knowledge they have with a single exception focused squarely on AI risk without any comparison to global poverty. That exception? The very article I'm responding to right now.

Is it a problem if we say this kind of thing amongst ourselves? Well, the simple fact is that it may well be true, and if so then it's pretty important that we recognise that. Perhaps Dylan is concerned that we're engaging in a kind of "government house utilitarianism" when we make these claims which we wouldn't to outsiders for fear of bad publicity. But if that's really your concern, then you should be open about the relative effectiveness of different causes and be damned, rather than pretend that third-world poverty is really the most important cause and hope that the world adjusts to fit your tastes.

EA Global was dominated by talk of existential risks, or X-risks.

 It's hard for me to comment on this in any detail, not having been there. But I am aware that there were a variety of different streams of talks on different topics. I don't have a list of those streams and can only remember what a couple of them were, so it's theoretically possible that the majority were about X-risk. But this seems unlikely. My concern here is that, due either to primarily attending X-risk focused talks or due to the people he happened to meet over drinks, Dylan may be projecting his own experience of the conference onto other people's.

The only X-risk basically anyone wanted to talk about at the conference was artificial intelligence.

This is very believable, and if true it is something where I agree with Dylan's criticism. I hold no particular opinion on what the most likely X-risks are, but it does seem to me that AI risk has captured the imagination of many EAs in a way that no other X-risk has. (That's not to say it isn't the most dangerous risk, though: I genuinely hold no opinion).

And indeed, the AI risk panel — featuring Musk, Bostrom, MIRI's executive director Nate Soares, and the legendary UC Berkeley AI researcher Stuart Russell — was the most hyped event at EA Global.

It is certainly true that Elon Musk's appearance was hyped. But from my perspective it appeared the it was Musk himself who was hyped, rather than the particular panel on which he appeared. Which is fair enough, in that he is (among nerds, at least) a genuine celebrity, whereas it's hard to point to any other EAs who are famous outside the EA movement and outside academic philosophy.


The discussion of Pascal's Mugging is fair enough.

The other problem is that the AI crowd seems to be assuming that people who might exist in the future should be counted equally to people who definitely exist today. That's by no means an obvious position, and tons of philosophers dispute it.

There are genuine arguments in favour of a "social discount rate", it is true. What surprises me is that Dylan links not to a discussion of this but of the non-identity problem. The non-identity problem is less obviously connected to this issue than the issue of a discount rate, but it's also not a problem. Then again, it's probably unfair to expect Dylan to have read the paper which proves it not to be a problem when that paper has yet to be written, let along published, and currently only exists outside my brain as a couple of tweets. (Basically, I'm going to consider the non-identity problem from various meta-ethical standpoints, and show that none of them would suggest the non-identity problem has any force. Hence if your normative ethics contain the non-identity problem, then that's a problem for your ethics rather than a reflection of how the moral world really is.)

More to the point, suppose potential (or, if you're a determinist, future) lives ought to be treated as having lower value than current lives. (Incidentally, suppose we could change the past. Would we regard past lives as being of lower significance than present lives? And would we advocate that our descendants view our lives as less important than their own?) So what? Unless you think they are worth many orders of magnitude less, this won't have a hope of possibly making X-risk from a uniquely imperative concern to merely one concern among many. Remember, the future is unimaginably huge.

To be fair, the AI folks weren't the only game in town. Another group emphasized "meta-charity," or giving to and working for effective altruist groups. The idea is that more good can be done if effective altruists try to expand the movement and get more people on board than if they focus on first-order projects like fighting poverty.

I understand his concern about this very well. Last year I was at the UK Effective Altruists retreat, and one of the sessions was a debate in which one side (Paul Christiano and Carl Shulman, IIRC) were supposed to argue in favour of holding off on donating and instead investing in order to donate more money later, while their opponents (I can't remember who they were) were supposed to argue that it is better to donate now. Both sides ended up agreeing that really it would be better to invest in making more people into EAs, which to me felt rather... cultish, maybe?

But I would dispute the claim that the current movement appeals only to computer science types. In the UK student EA population we have plenty of Philosophy and Economics students, with the occasional mathematician. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to introduce my flatmates over the last year to EA, and got precisely nowhere. One is a current CS undergrad, while another is a professional software engineer. I think it is true that EA appeals primarily, indeed almost exclusively, to highly-educated people, but the idea that they are all computer science people is, to me, laughable. Indeed Dylan's claim seems like it may well be a textbook case of selection bias. "All these people in a movement do CS!" Well, try attending a conference which isn't held at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley. Come to Oxford and we'll show you the most armchair-ridden horde of philosophers you can imagine, all of them EAs. Come to Melbourne and we'll show you a beer-chugging army of EAs of all sorts. (Incidentally: San Fransisco EAs are one-boxers. Oxford EAs are two-boxers. Melbourne EAs are kangaroo-boxers.)


While I'm writing this, there's one other thing I want to mention: in his original Voxsplainer about EA, Dylan claimed that EAs "tend to be favourable to the domestic welfare state", or something to that effect. I forget the wording, and it's an hour and a half after I intended to be in bed (hence the awful puns and racist stereotyping) so I'm not going looking for it now. Anyway: that's not my experience. EAs are in my experience no more left-wing than any other young and well-educated social group, and indeed contain a disproportionate number of libertarians.

Indeed, one of the things that originally got me interested in EA is how it completely wrecks the case for the welfare state: if you think we have positive duties to help other people, then within-country redistribution is a ridiculously poor way to go about that. If you want to defend domestic welfare from an EA perspective, then you should do it by coming up with some argument that a robust welfare system will help aid domestic growth and so allow more donations to the third world. Claiming that domestic aid is a good way to directly promote global utility isn't even bullshit, it's a dirty great lie.

Review of Volpone

(Spoilers ahead).

I spent the day in Stratford-upon-Avon, a picturesque but rather dull town which is chiefly famous as the birthplace of William Shakespeare. After a walk along the River Avon and a traipse through the Moving Arts and Design (MAD) Museum, in the afternoon I could find nothing better to do than to watch a play put on at the Swan Theatre by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The play, Volpone, was written by Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson.

For the most part I've found marble runs are much the same,
but this was a nice one.

From a more serious part of the MAD Museum. I didn't understand most of the
"artistic" "sculpture" type things, but I liked this one.

The play was well-performed and enjoyable. It tells the story of the greedy nobleman Volpone, who feigns sickness unto death in order to procure gifts from those who wish to ingratiate themselves unto him, and so be named his heir. The title character was very convincingly played by Henry Goodman. although to me it felt like just as important a character was his assistant Mosca (Orion Lee). Lee was less convincing - his flattery seemed to be laid on impossibly thick - but it was still an entirely competent performance.

The play was originally set in Renaissance Venice. This clearly was not - despite keeping the Elizabethan language, they used modern dress and a variety of modern gizmos (mobile phones, a stock exchange tracker, etc) and updated many of the references. The accents were varied - businessman Corvino (Matthew Kelly) spoke in a broad Yorkshire accent, his much-abused wife Celia (Rhiannon Handy) in a vaguely east-European accent, traveller Peregrine (Colin Ryan) is firmly American, and the only Italian accent to be heard is when Volpone disguises himself as a travelling seller of snake-oil.

The ending of the play seemed very accelerated. An attempt by Volpone, Mosca and their various avaricious fools to frame Celia and Bonario (Andy Apollo) for adultery and battery goes awry when Volpone's love of mischief and Mosca's greed causes all to turn upon each other. Celia and Bonario are subsequently exonerated, which is fair enough; the judges then, with no further investigation, are somehow aware of all the underhanded dealings to which hitherto only the audience has been privy. There was some satisfaction in seeing so many unpleasant characters punished and the only two good characters (not the only likeable characters, to be sure, but the only good characters) leaving the court hand in hand (Celia having been granted a divorce "with her dowry returned in triple", and Bonario being granted the lands of his father, "who could not live well but may perhaps die well") but given that until not ten minutes hence all had been entirely under control, the sudden downfall of the main characters combined with a moralistic epilogue made the ending rather unconvincing.

I didn't buy the program, although the cast-list which I do have mentions that it contains among various essays one by "leading financial journalist Gillian Tett on greed of modern-day bankers". Similarly in the trailer (below), director Trevor Nunn refers to the "fact" that "greed has not gone away, but has in fact increased". It didn't spoil my enjoyment, but it was disappointing to be reminded of how Guardianista the arts world is.

All in all, the play is well worth seeing if you're around Stratford. But putting a major national theatre in Stratford is stupid, because it takes a solid hour to get there even from Birmingham. I blame public funding of the arts, which moves theatre away from what people want to see not only by changing the plays which are performed, but also by moving genuinely worthwhile plays like this one away from audiences. In any case, is it worth going to Stratford to see? Probably.

On Jeremy Corbyn

The Parliamentary Labour Party are currently very flustered by the possibility that their next leader could be militant hard-leftist Jeremy Corbyn, a man who saw the 1983 election manifesto as poorly presented but otherwise tremendous in every way. The Conservative Party are torn between those who see it as a guaranteed third term, and those who are concerned about the effect this will have upon the government.

I hold no position upon whether Corbyn being elected as the Labour leader would be good for the country. However, I feel that it is worth explaining precisely why I hold no position.

Like most observers, I think that Corbyn's election would be a disaster for the Labour party as it currently exists. Some have suggested that either he will get knifed by some upstart or there will be a schism with many members leaving to form a new party. I wouldn't count on this, largely because no-one ever looked at all like doing this to Ed Miliband despite him facing many of the same criticisms of being too left-wing and union-dominated. The Green Party will probably lose a lot of voters, given that Corbyn appeals to the same demographic that they rely on (i.e. white, public sector, high self-perception of intelligence).

But that's not something I especially care about. The Labour Party will fix itself or it won't, and if it doesn't then it will be shut out of power until the next major crisis. (By "major crisis" I mean something sufficient to render a government party unelectable, such as the Suez Crisis or one of those European-style debt crises).

The effect on the governing Conservative party is what worries me. I really don't know how they will behave, because I really lack a model for the behaviour of political parties.

As an analogy to my difficulty in modelling parties, let's go into how economists model firms. This is a field which was opened by the late Ronald Coase in a 1937 paper called "The Nature of the Firm". Coase assumed that, just as individuals were until recently taken to maximise their utility, firms would act so as to maximise their profit. It's a plausible assumption, clearly true to at least some extent (firms which fail to make profits will go out of business) and above all it makes models tractable.

But then William Baumol came along and pointed out that many firms are owned by shareholders but managed by people who may not themselves be shareholders. Under these conditions, especially in uncompetitive markets, firms may act so as to achieve other ends unless the shareholders can effectively exercise control over the managers' actions - and if they could, then what would be the point of having managers? Baumol suggested that firms act so as to raise the prestige of managers, which may be done less by maximising profit so much as maximising market share or sales.

Later, Oliver Williamson came along with yet another theory. He thought that managers face pressure to "satisfice" on profit - to acheive a certain minimum level of profitability for the firm. Beyond this, he thought, money can be frittered away in all kinds of ways, generally with minimal real effect upon the actual productivity of the firm (chauffeur-driven cars, fancy offices, charity programs, etc).

When modelling the behaviour of a firm, an economist must choose one of these models (or one of the presumably many others - there were only the ones covered in first-year microeconomics). Similarly, when modelling the actions of a government one needs a model for how it behaves.

One possibility is that parties act so as to maximise vote share. In a two-party system this leads to virtually indistinguishable parties; once you add in more parties it becomes more complicated, but I think that this is a plausible model for most actions. This would imply that in response to Labour unilaterally moving to the left, the Tories would also move left. I would view this as bad.

Alternatively, perhaps parties satisfice on votes and maximise ideological purity. This is another plausible theory, and suggests that the government may become more right-wing economically (maybe yay?) and/or more authoritarian (boo!). (This is of course assuming that politics follows the two-axis model of economic left-right and social liberal-authoritarian. I actually think that, in terms of practical politics, this does a reasonable job, even though in the world of ideas it is grossly inadequate).

Perhaps parties simply reflect the feelings of those in charge of determining policy. In which there is no particular reason to think that Corbyn's election would change the actions of the government, but would make a Tory third term more likely than a Labour takeover of government. This is maybe good?

If I put more thought in, I daresay I could come up with a whole bunch of other models and look at their implications. The problem is that I don't know which of them is most accurate (indeed, if Corbyn were actually elected and ran a far-left opposition then this would seem like a severe challenge to at least two of the models I have suggested, whereas rebellion against him would severely undermine the remaining one). So I really have no idea what the effects of Corbyn being elected would be.

All that said, it would be funny if he won.

Empirical Uncertainty is not Choice

One problem for standard theistic positions is the "Problem of Divine Hiddenness": if God wanted us to worship Him, why did He not make his presence more obvious?

The most popular reply, which I first encountered in Tim Keller's The Reason for God and is also trotted out in the Oxford University Philosophy of Religion course which is available on iTunes U, is that it gives us the option of choosing to love God. We can draw an analogy to a child who ought to love her sister. Her parents threaten to punish her if she does not love her sister. It seems sensible to think that even if the child does love her sister, if this love is motivated only by the threat of punishment then it is not love for the right reason. The child needs to make a choice to love her sister.

Take this back to the case of religion. For God to make his existence obvious, theist philosophers claim, would be equivalent to standing over all men with a fiery whip and proclaiming that men had better follow Him, or else! By giving us counter-evidence to His existence, God then secures for us the all-important good of freedom, freedom to choose to love Him.

It's a nice story, but it's one I find utterly unconvincing. In fact, when properly viewed this argument is in fact a very serious concession to non-theists.

Returning to the case of the sisters. Suppose the parents want their daughters to love each other, but do not want to force this. In order to achieve this, they first establish a pattern of only sometimes going through with threatened punishments. They then issue the original threat. There is therefore a degree of uncertainty, at least from the perspective of the child, as to whether the threat is genuine.

Suppose she decides to act as though it is. This is surely no different from the original case! In both scenarios she is motivated not by an intrinsic desire to love her sister, but by the threat of what her parents will do. The fact that the threat may not be entirely genuine is irrelevant.

Note, however, the concession made by the theist to get here. They had to argue that it would be wrong for God to give us strong or incontrovertible evidence for his existence. Consider Richard Swinburne's claim that "it is 97% probable that God exists." Is this really something that they want to be arguing?