The Conflict of Science and Religion.

Contents Updated: Wednesday, February 14, 2001

• The Conflict of Science and Religion
• Admirers of Religion
• The Psychology of Religion
• Science
• Christians Deny any Conflict
• The Bible on Science
• Liberal Christianity
• Rogue Scientists
• Social Progress
• Science and Belief
• Right and Wrong
• Explaining Away
• Scientific Christianity?

The Conflict of Science and Religion

Science has always conflicted with religion, apart from early instances of scientific discovery which were in the hands of priests for their own purposes—the astronomical observations of the Chaldæan priests were to allow them to keep a calendar. Science began in the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor. These Greeks learned the rudiments of practical science from Phœnicians and Egyptians, but what inspired them to new heights was the cosmogony of the Persians, whose Zoroastrian religion provided new insights into the nature of things. From these foundations, the Greeks saw that reason and senses could be used to acquire knowledge.

What little remains of the speculations of these early pioneers of science shows they were not popular with their religious compatriots. The more outspoken of them were chased from city to city for blaspheming the gods. Religious prejudice against science in Athens was much worse. Anaxagoras, who tried to found a scientific school there, had to flee for his life. The Athenian philosophers found it advisable for the integrity of their lives to despise science and to devote themselves to “spiritual realities”, though even this did not save Socrates from enforced suicide on the charge of impiety.

A few centuries later the work of science centred in the Greek city of Alexandria founded by Alexander in Egypt. Science made progress but a new religion, Christianity, got political power, murdered the last brilliant representative of Greek thought, Hypatia, and extinguished scientific research. So, the first thousand years of science, from Thales to Hypatia, were marked by conflict with religion, and, of all the religions, Christianity was the most deadly. It snuffed out learning for a thousand years.

Science began again in Europe. The ideas of the Greeks lingered in Greek literature, but mainly not in the Christian Greek Empire where no one could read them, except for a few monks who believed reading was to allow them to know devotional works only. Greek literature and science were mainly deliberately destroyed or left to decay. Skepticism however reappeared in the Baghdad and Damascus of the Arab empire, and science revived. The ideas of the Greeks were taken out of their tomb in Greek literature, and commerce with China brought new scientific ideas to Persia and Syria via the silk road.

This culture of science was carried across northern Africa to Spain, and the Moors of Cordoba developed it with a brilliance that reminds us of the ancient Athenians. Jews and a few Christian wandering scholars took translations of Arab works to Italy, France, and England, and, as the Moslems had settled also in Sicily and the south of Italy, a similar stream poured northward from there. Christian Europe began to cultivate science, in spite of the Fathers. Naïve modern Christians, for whom truth is Jesus and not the facts of history, clap their hands and say, “Praise God for our Roger Bacon, our Albert the Great, our Gerbert, our Mendel,” and whatever other monks they can find that can be said to have contributed to the renaissance of science.

From Bacon to Copernicus they did little more than repeat what Greeks or Moors had told them, but the moment they did, the conflict between science and religion began again. As Joseph McCabe points out:

Bacon spent nearly half his adult life in his monastic prison, Albert was extinguished with a mitre, Gerbert with a tiara, Copernicus dreaded to publish his conviction that Pythagoras was right until he was beyond the reach of the Inquisition, Arnold of Villeneuve was hounded from land to land, friar Jean de Roquetaillade died in prison, Cecco d'Ascoli and Giordano Bruno were burned, Galileo was smitten on the mouth by the Inquisition, Vesalius narrowly escaped its holy wrath.

Christendom was weakened by the great schism, and the world became sufficiently enlightened to see that one need not be burned at the stake for studying chemistry, physics, astronomy or anatomy, though such work was held to be damnable. Erasmus warned the church that it was identifying learning with heresy in such a way as to make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance. This was not new, it was what Christianity had always done, but to say so was daring. Galileo was not simply inviting the clerics to see planets but to take an utterly new view on knowledge and life. Visible existence was just a shadow on a cave wall, according to Plato, the view that suited the Christian bishops because they offered themselves to the ignorant as shamans that understood hidden things. Galileo stood for science, and that threatened the very raison d'etre of religion as the revealer of mysteries.

With the nineteenth century a new phase opened. Deists criticized the crudities and inconsistencies of the Jewish scriptures, and scientific men now began to reconstruct the real history of the earth and of man on lines which were different from those of Genesis. As Huxley said, they often came across Christian pickets with notices saying: “Thus far shalt though go and no further. By order of Moses”. What was the origin of the stars, the plants, the animals, man, language, religion, the moral sense, civilization? How old was the earth? Had the rocks been gradually formed by deposits in water? How old was man? No entry! The answer was in the Jewish scriptures.

Admirers of Religion

Influential men promote the fiction that all religions do good, and some religion is necessary. Presidents and Prime Ministers tell us, in tones vibrant with sincerity and a tear in their eye, that we rely upon our devoted clergy for our spiritual sustenance. It is votes, not religion that concerns them—the clergy can secure, or remove, votes for a candidate that mean victory or defeat. Media moguls are fervent that religion will keep our behaviour good, and financiers that it will justify their wealth as a gift of God. Judges command their gravest gravity when they speak of it. Educators cannot conceive of teaching without it. Professors and literati are superior to creeds, but they never disturb the allegiance of the millions to religion.

Only ignorant half-wits, social terrorists and nihilists unable and unwilling to appreciate the truth and value of religion—as do politicians, policemen, preachers, editors—ever challenge the vital importance to us of religion. Criticising religion is still unpopular. Without an awe-stricken veneration for religion in the mass of the people, some people and classes of people begin to get uneasy, and even murderous.

A politician who rains promises on the the just and the unjust alike to garner their votes, will say it does not matter which religion we cherish as long as we have some religion. That is the common attitude on this question, though often nowadays people will say “spirituality” meaning the same thing. It is nonsense. Half of Americans go to church and half do not. Is there any difference between them? In Chicago, many of the population are Roman Catholics. In London, proportionately hardly any. Yet the incidence of crime has always been higher in Chicago than in London. Half a century ago, many countries that were openly fascist were Roman Catholic, and the Pope warmly supported their dictators, or declined to criticise them. That might have been good practical sense in the face of such madmen, but it was not noble or principled.

When the clergy divided the community between them they reviled each other’s creed. Between them they proved that both the Catholic and the Protestant creeds inspired saintliness and promoted wickedness at the same time. When most people concluded that neither seemed to be necessary, they united to say that some religion is a vital need, and that at all costs we must preserve a prejudice against unbelief. Clergymen have a sound vested interest. Religion is their living. We can therefore ignore their opinions on this subject.

A famous journalist, who wrote graceful expositions of Christian faith to be read by millions, was actually a skeptic. Challenged about the dishonesty of this, his airy reply was, “People like that sort of thing”. Journalists and editors, let there be no doubt, are mainly as unprincipled as this. They are like gulls at a sewage outlet squabbling over shit—rivals for a lowest common denominator of readers. The clergy see to it that their congregations know what lines editors are taking in the newspapers and journals. Catholics were warned by the Catholic priesthood not to go see the movie “Angela’s Ashes” or read Frank McCourt’s book. Editors are not bothered about skeptical readers because they do not have any organization behind them, and can only show their disgust by writing internet pages that no one reads.

Others are afraid of the clergy. Their sinecures are threatened, or their freedom to teach science is threatened, or their comfort is threatened. Silence about religion is prudent, but a word in its favour might be profitable.

Because of this one-sidedness, two hundred million people in the United States agree with the editors and politicians about the influence of religion on society. For all that, over a half of them pay more attention to the model of their car. The religious half have little common ground. Some say religion is only valuable in a sacerdotal and sacramental form, without which you are sure to fail—only ministers or priests can communicate this magic. Others spit contempt on the service of religion, because the saving part of religion is to believe that Christ died for your sins, and the Old Testament is the Word of God. Yet others rule those out and say that religion is to believe in the love of a personal God, and worship him. A separate group, that of the intellectuals, if they dared to give a view, would mostly say the idea of a personal God verges on lunacy.

The Psychology of Religion

Religion is also maintained by the momentum of the tradition of churchgoing, social considerations, and the activity of organizers or leaders. But there are profound psychological reasons. There is a vanity of virtue in it, like the vanity of cosmetics, fashion and lifestyle. Some feel it helps them to be virtuous to listen to a man talking to them about God and goodness for an hour every Sunday, and to stand in rows and sing a hymn about it. It is an evolutionary relic of the pecking order. We used to roll on our backs, expose our vulnerable parts and whine ingratiatingly when a dominant animal came near us. When the dominant animals in our society tell us it is not necessary, we find ourselves maladapted, miss our cringing habit and have to go to church to be able to satisfy our evolutionary urges.

Freud diagnosed religion as “the universal neurosis of humanity”. The truth about Freud’s description of religion as a life of neurosis and illusion, is that when people try to order their lives by reference to hidden realities beyond experience that allow them to slot into some pre-ordained righteous pattern of things, they are avoiding facing real experience in the real world. They prefer the obsession of a paranoid fantasy to taking the responsibility of creatively addressing the problems that we ourselves are causing in the world.

Paranoia can be a sense of persecution or a sense of excessive worth. Christians suffer from both, and both prevent them from seeing the world we inhabit as being what they should value above all. Freud saw that religion made the matter of escape respectable by allowing victims to share their delusions with a whole society of fellow maniacs and therefore feel sane. The lonely timid person feeling overwhelmed by reality could accept a highly articulated mythology and doctrine approved by God and thereby gain a courage they did not know they had.

It was all right for the individual sufferer, but not for the real world they lived in or for others who did not need this fantasy therapy. The world was treated as a temporary abode of no worth and others were themselves treated as if they were the insane ones, and forced to join the asylum, often on pain of death. The old horror movie, the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari illustrates it.

Alexander Osipov, who was a Russian Orthodox priest and editor of the Patriarchal bible, openly declared that many mentally ill people went mad or developed nervous illnesses for religious reasons—and often it had a sexual aspect. The adoration of shepherds was the adoration of young or popular preachers by women who were hysterical or verging on hysteria—the “shepherds” in Judaism were priests, as they are in Christianity. The adoration is not religious but the seething of unsatisfied passion, condemned and suppressed by religion itself.

Personal religion is often neurotic. Obsessional people like the ritual. Depressed people think they are worthless and wicked and seek to be penitents through confession or submission. Unaddressed fear of natural sexuality leads to chaste denial then frustrated brutality and unkind sternness in nuns and priests. Simplistic wish-fulfilment can lead people to clappy triteness and over-evangelism, while real problems are pushed aside as “this-worldly”. In these examples, religion, if not neurotic itself, is where neurotic personalities go for acceptance. C F D Moule said:

A concern for Jesus is a sign of neurotic obsession. If this is so then let the psychiatrist heal us of our Christian sickness.

Doubtless Moule will have written his request with a smile hoping it would be read as a reductio ad absurdum that would rebound on those who thought it so. It is so.

Passive dependency on a God the Father is found in many adults, and though God is not merely a projection of their own father, He can be when practical religion is no more than infantile “saying prayers” and comforting bedtime stories. Christianity means a degrading submissiveness, that it is hard to believe any sane God could condone, let alone desire. Moule thought it quite natural for us to be as God was, taking Christ to be God in the form of the Son—submissive. And the Son…

…clearly thought of God as Creator and as Father. If so, how can it be a violation of a creature’s self to conform to such a Creator’s design?

This is the clever theologian adding more mythological justifications to the knee bending habits required by this particular Christian paranoia. The restriction of human creativity to the observation of set rituals in church on the ground that this is the will of God, is avoiding real responsibility just as much as individual neurotics who cannot live without the obsessive completion of their private handwashing or sock counting rituals. “Belief” applied in this way, in practice does not safeguard our true nature—it inhibits it. A non-paranoid religion ought not to hold up supposed supernatural patterns of existence as the norm for human behaviour to be judged. Today we have to be judged in relation to the needs of the world that we have hitherto been taught was valueless, if not wicked, but which offers us the only life we know. A preoccupation with the supernatural can only detract from our proper occupation—the natural. As long as so many people remain entranced by the apologists of otherworldly religion, there is no hope of us ever saving the world we live in.

Yet, many people are deeply uneasy at the loss of the fear of the supernatural and the cosmic order of God. These people are not neurotic in the sense that they should fear nothing at all. The proper fear now is the use to which politicians, generals and businessmen put the results of science. The huge increase of power humanity has gained through science emphasises more than ever the need for a correct view of the world and what we should do in it. We need a more compelling vision of the value of the world than we ever did. It is essential that we face up to reality.

Science

Science shows that the earth had been formed gradually during billions of years, that man was millions of years old, that languages had evolved, that living things had been on this earth for hundreds of millions of years, and that there never had been an interruption of life by a great deluge—though there had by the ice ages that God did not mention. Religion taught the opposite—it was all done in instants. To talk of a few combative theologians sparring with a few combative scientists about these matters is utter historical untruth.

In the years since Galileo, the correctness of the experimental method has been vindicated beyond question. Science is a method of enquiry and the body of results that emerge from it. Observational science succeeds by finding truth in experience, in action in the material world. Emphatically it is a method not a revelation of the absolute. Its hypotheses are models of existence, not recreations of it, but they take us by degrees towards the truth.

An underlying assumption of scientific method, but one which is verified by its success, is that Nature is not capricious but stable and orderly in its basic laws. We have this from Michael Poole, in the Lion Manual called a Guide to Science and Belief, which seeks to indoctrinate children aged about fourteen into believing Chrsitian religion is the equal of science. Science and Belief is a misnomer. Its very content demonstrates the conflict betwwen science and religion while it pretends there is none. It has nothing to do with science which it denigrates none too subtly. It is entirely about belief. It is intended to fool young people into thinking that science is inadequate and they must believe in God. The book is worthless, misleading and dishonest, but illustrates many points we are making and we shall meet it again.

Poole is fond of giving quotations of scientists who verify religion. One such quotation is by Albert Einstein. Einstein was from a Jewish family and was brought up in a Catholic school, so himself suffered indoctrination as a child. Poole quotes him as a scientist having “some religious belief:”

To the sphere of religion belongs the faith that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that it is comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith.

Einstein here is simply asserting that Nature is rational, the working assumption of all science. A working assumption is eventually verified or disproved by practice—whether it actually works. Over a long period of time now, science has shown that it does work—Nature is rational and can be known. It is therefore no longer a matter of faith for a scientist, and no religion—if it is to be equated with this faith—is needed.

Scientific results are not arbitrary. They have to emerge from the method, and the method demands that they are in concordance with reality. That is ensured by the publication of the results, and the particulars of the method whereby they were reached, so that others can verify them. Only when others skilled in the same field agree they are true do the results join the body of knowledge called science. If someone disagrees, they must publish their own work showing their evidence, and it must be accepted as sound before any revision of current knowledge will be considered. If authorities are divided, then no scientific fact has been established. All this is at the pinnacle of some branch of science, but further back, there is increasing confidence in the soundness of established knowledge because later knowledge is built upon it, and eventually if one of these bricks does not fit properly, the edifice will lose strength and have to be rethought and rebuilt. Sometimes this happens, and is called a “shift of scientific paradigm”.

Nothing can be unequivocally proved by experiment because no experiment can take into account every possible circumstance. What is possible is that a hypothesis proposed to account for some experimental or observational findings can be disproved. The philosopher, Karl Popper, claimed that any scientific hypothesis must be disprovable. Popper came to admit that some scientific ideas could be disproved by circumstantial evidence. Historical reconstructions and evolution fall into this category.

That is science. Science is not a question of opinion. Understand that science is not addressing whatever Christians or Jews might think of as “fact” because it is in their holy scriptures. Both theologians and some scientists deceive their readers over this, and are to that extent as crooked as the politician who takes a bribe. The question is not whether science sets out to deny religious statements but whether what science teaches conflicts with what religion teaches.

Christians Deny any Conflict

The scientific method depends upon scepticism, unrestricted questioning and irreverence, while the church depends on belief, acceptance and respect for authority.

Belief cannot be said to be wrong in iself, but but to hold a belief or beliefs on no basis at all or on some basis other than truth or likelihood is morally wrong. Christianity urges people just to believe—to have faith. That is morally wrong. From this Christian preaching, millions have expunged proper elements of doubt from their minds in whole swathes of their life for fear of seeming weak before God, and have conditioned themselves through a form of Couéism into a way of life of dubious benefit to themselves, though it benefits others. The bible has no place for honest doubt—doubt is sinful, unbelieving minds having been blinded by the Devil (2 Cor 4:4). Christians teach belief because it suits the ruling powers of the world. To Believe is to Obey. Religion is about obedience.

Piaget looked into the cognitive development of children finding that children under five could not understand rules at all. From five to nine, children have the idea of rules and take them seriously when adults or older children lay them down, and they accept the rule that they will be punished for breaking a rule. They are however, not bothered about the reason for the rules. Over the age of ten, they come to realise that the rules are mutually agreed and can be questioned and changed. Canon Ronald Preston of Manchester, a university lecturer in Christian ethics, observed:

From this work of Piaget’s, Christian ethics is appropriate to the mental ages of five to nine, but it tends to fix the believer in an immature attitude, a reluctance to grow up and to pass from independence to freedom and maturity, and hence to responsibility.

John Elsom similarly charged that the moral authoritarianism of Christianity hampers the growth of moral awareness by encouraging stock moral reactions to particular circumstances, and prevents learning from experience. So the growth of personal morality is blocked and Christians are left unable to deal with unfamiliar moral dilemmas. The vast body of truth called “science,” mostly conflicts head on with religion because it was discovered by continual reference to experience.

Christians say there never was a conflict between religion and science, only skirmishes caused by misunderstanding. This is dishonest. What every Church said about geology and evolution was opposed to what science said.

Religious people who dismiss all this with the assurance that their grandparents were unfortunately mistaken as to what religion really implied, are also untruthful. The plain words of the introduction to the bible say clearly what they mean and those who would interpret them to suit science are desperately trying to refashion a sow’s ear into a silk purse. The early chapters of Genesis are accurately translated on the whole. Only when the authors mention “loins” and “thighs,” do the shocked Christian translators happily and without compunction change God’s original meaning. The bible writers, whoever they were, meant what they said, and the Jews have so understood them for twenty-five hundred years. Putting a new interpretation on their words “in the light of science” is not “interpreting” at all, it is re-writing. It is interpretation to mean precisely the opposite.

The modern stage is for liberal Christians to ignore “interpretation” and accept that the bible contains no revelation, or that there is no religious obligation to consider it in regard to science or history. Yet, if anyone thinks that they can escape conflict of science and religion in this way, they do not understand the basis of their Christianity. Is the biblical fall of man a truth of religion expressing a truthful statement about prehistoric life? Or is it a religious metaphor that can be ignored in the light of science? The former puts Christianity in conflict with science. Science opposes it. The latter—the Christian is not compelled to believe it—destroys the foundation of Christianity. If some Christians say they do not accept original sin and an atonement for it, then they cannot be Christian—it is the supposed reason why God had to appear as a man to be tortured for Adam’s sins in the Garden of Eden.

Liberal believers say God knows everything and takes a special interest in religion, truth, and Churches, yet they accept that the great religious institutions of the Jews and Christians taught a lot of nonsense. Humanity gets no help from Gods even in religious matters! They say religion changes and grows just like science, but the difference is that science grows more confident in its method, if not in its application by politicians and businessmen, while religion grows less confident because it is superstition, and, through education, people increasingly see that they can do without it. Science reaches unanimity because it has to match the reality of the world as we experience or observe it, while religion has lost unanimity about everything, even about God, because ultimately it is personal prejudice.

The Bible on Science

What, though, does religion teach? Religion? How many religions are there? And, in any one sect, there are hundreds of shades of belief. Religious beliefs from Pantheism to Popeless Catholicism exist in many modern Protestant churches, uneasily combined with the specific teachings of their ordained ministers. No major Church now insists on a literal acceptance of all its formulae. Some churches openly state that no belief at all is imposed as a condition of membership, yet they still register as a “religion”.

Fundamentalist doctrines blatantly conflict with established science. The doctrines of God and the soul, which are common to all religions that demand any specific belief at all, are less openly, but seriously, discredited, by the teaching of science. Christians are fond of telling us that there are questions that science cannot answer—and never will be able to! “Has the universe a purpose?” is an example. The implication is that religion, specifically Christianity, can answer questions like this. Where do we find the answers to questions like this, then? In the bible, of course. What then is the purpose of the universe? Er…

Even ultra-liberal religions which dispense with a personal God, or even an impersonal one, and leave open the question of immortality, still lie in the path of advancing science. Any belief or statement, as distinct from sentiment, which calls itself religious, is in conflict with the teaching of science.

Evolution is scientific. No writer quoted in Fundamentalist literature as opposed to evolution is an authority on the subject. Some are scientists but usually in a different field from biology or evolution and invariably they misunderstand or misrepresent the scientific position. A recent example is Michael Poole, in the book mentioned above, who objects to “chance” being personified when evolution is being described. Michael Poole is, astonishingly, a lecturer in science education in King’s College, London, a decision of the university authorities, one might think, like inviting Hannibal Lecter to teach vegetarianism.

This man, professing to be an authority on science, declares that to treat science as a secular substitute for God is “idolatry”. That the author states it in this shock-horror way suggests that he sees “idolatry” that way himself. Doubtless this would evoke gasps of horror from Christians but any scientist would just look bemused. Elsewhere he tells us “God is always working in the world, moment by moment”. In his discussion of Darwin’s theory he insists “'nature' is not a person who ’selects'”. The truth is Poole is essentially a Christian Fundamentalist opposed to scientific naturalism, which he sees as the enemy of God, quite rightly, but still pretends there is no conflict between science and religion.

Poole does not like Richard Dawkins saying that chance “causes” mutations, and that chance and natural selection “cause” miracles like dinosaurs and human beings, or even a microbe, one might add. The reason, this great exponent of the history of science declares, is that chance gets treated as a secular substitute for God. Oh dear! Dawkins has stepped on God’s toes and upset one of His kneebenders.

Avoiding personification of such concepts is neither economic with words or necessary. In the same book Poole quotes his favourite, C S Lewis approvingly when he said: “If we are going to talk about things not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically”. Two definitions of “chance” are “the unforeseen and undesigned occurrence of events,” and “the imaginary or unknown agency supposed to be the cause of some unexplained events”. To substitute the words of either definition each time he wanted to say “chance” is likely to be painful to Dawkins' readers, and understanding the word by the second definition is what put God’s bulldog, Mr Poole, at Dawkins' throat.

All that Dawkins is saying is that mutations occur randomly (”by chance”) and that a great many of such chance mutations selected by the effects of Nature on the ability of the creature thus mutated to reproduce causes evolution. It requires no mystery and no divine intervention. Yet, Poole as uncomprehending as a slug writes:

”Chance” processes in evolution do not rule out divine purpose.

Using chance as an adjective and putting it in inverted commas for added protection, Poole avoids his own criticism, but the alert reader will note that the first definition above states that “chance” is “undesigned”. How can something that happens without design serve a purpose?

Poole thinks that chance simply means without an identifiable cause, implying that there is nevertheless a cause, though we do not know what it is, yet even the second definition above warns the reader that the cause might only be “supposed”. Poole wants it to be certain, and be God’s finger. Yet, far from being without an identifiable cause, often the cause of a chance event is plain to see. Cosmic rays are one cause of mutations. What is “unforeseen and undesigned” is which gene will be hit.

Poole proves his utter incomprehension by writing:

Far from being an unlikely outcome of chance processes, one biologist, Manfred Eigen, has argued: “The evolution of life… must be considered an inevitable process despite its indeterminate course… it is not only inevitable in principle but also sufficiently probable within a realistic span of time”.

Poole seems to think that because Eigen says the evolution of life is “probable within a realistic span of time” that it is not a chance process. He wants it to be a law of God even though such a law denies God his normal role of Creator. He no longer creates, Poole is telling us, He simply creates the laws of creation. See! Note that Eigen’s “realistic” is rather like the lawyers' “reasonable”. It does not actually tell you anything. Note also that Eigen himself is clear that the course of the evolution is “indeterminate”. That means it progresses by chance! Eigen is making the important point that life is more probable than anyone previously thought, but he is not saying how much more probable. Given an infinite span of time any event with a small but non-zero probability will happen. He is saying that the chances of it happening are large enough—though still small—for it to happen sooner than anyone expected.

Poole is reverting, as simple genuflectors often do when more sophisticated ones look on embarrassed, to the God of the gaps. He is not willing to accept that something can be random, preferring to hope that God is invisibly present deciding what events would happen all the time, making things appear random to us, but God—clever chap—knows! “We are not in a position to deny the evidence of a plan until we have all the facts,” he says, and presumably “all the facts” includes the fact that we have them all. He wants us to be God to see God—a typical Christian dishonesty.

Genesis is completely irreconcilable with science on a score of points apart from evolution, and Genesis, as we have it, was certainly not written until a thousand years after the alleged time of Moses, and so could not have been written by him on two counts. It is a fraudulent compilation if it claims otherwise. The legends which are found in the first few chapters of Genesis were taken from the Babylonians. Christians warn us, in case we should err, that there are passages in the bible that should not be read like a scientific journal. What they will not tell us is which should be so read and which should not. At the time of Galileo, they did not make such a distinction but now they do. Why is that? Because science has in the last 300 years shown that much of the bible is false. The passages that science has shown to be wrong therefore were only literary or poetic truths not literally true. Christians are fond of shifting the goalposts to make sure skeptics cannot score.

Fundamentalists ought to try exercising their reason. On the one hand are their own professors of divinity who refuse to use even their common sense, and their preachers who have none. On the other hand are most learned theologians of the world and the united and unanimous experts in astronomy, biology, physiology, zoology, geology, psychology, anthropology and archeology. Fundamentalist literature deceives Fundamentalist punters into thinking that scientists are themselves not agreed about evolution. They are unanimous! Science is not opinion. All of those, who have tested the theory of evolution against the evidence, accept it. That some people cannot understand the theory, or the evidence, is not a refutation of evolution but of their qualifications to comment on it. These people are the ones the Fundamentalist editors quote.

If evolution were the only point at issue with the Fundamentalists, one could suspend judgment, but it is not the only point. While a large set of experts proves evolution, another set proves by its internal evidence that the Pentateuch was not written until about 500 BC. Another set derives from the ruins of Babylonia and Assyria legends of creation, Eden, fall, and deluge so closely corresponding to the Jewish legends that no one can doubt their identity. Another set shows that the history of the Jews has been different from the story of the Jewish scriptures. And so on. Against this mass of evidence accumulated by independent bodies of the most highly trained students in the world, the Fundamentalists can only put… what? The word of God? Most of them could not tell you why they believe the Jewish scriptures are the word of God.

Fundamentalist leaders plead that they are not opposed to “true science,” meaning “false science”—science that supports their unscientific views. This will fool their followers who think the concept of true science sounds reasonable, not realising that no “science” can exist that will support Christianity. They are like little boys who point their toy guns and say, “Bang, you're dead,” and, in their imaginations, it is so. Christians have no idea how they have been utterly deceived by the literature put in their hands and by the mendacity of their leaders who are incompetent to deal with such important questions. They are being fooled by confidence tricksters for no other reason than to extract a regular stream of dollar bills from them. How many TV evangelists are poor?

Liberal Christianity

The story assailed by science in its beginning in Genesis is equally assailed in its culmination in the New Testament. The science of comparative religion shows us in the older Pagan religions the origin of the explanations of Christ’s miraculous birth, atoning death, and resurrection. The position of any Christian who holds the Church doctrines of the creation and fall of man, and the miraculous birth, atoning death, and resurrection of Christ, is in flat contradiction with science. Comparative religion is properly studied as a science as truly as biology is. It is nonsense to say “science” has no bearing on the virgin-birth and the resurrection. The science of comparative religion reveals equivalent stories centuries older than Christianity.

Modernism in Christianity is the candid admission that the bible is wrong—that there was no revelation, no fall of man, and no atoning death—but there is a God, who has put in the breast of men a hope of immortality which he may be expected to fulfill, and that Christ and Christianity are the supreme guardians and exponents of the moral law. Their battle cry is, “Do not bother about theology. Stick to ethics! Christianity is the Sermon on the Mount!” This frank repainting of Christianity ends the conflict with science by ending Christianity.

Believers who put new interpretations—or none—on the old doctrines of creation, original sin, atonement, resurrection, have abandoned Christian doctrine. The former manager of the English association football team, Glenn Hoddle, claimed to be a born again Christian, but after putting a faith healing lady friend on the English national payroll failed to ensure the team won, admiring spiritualism and then declaring his belief in reincarnation by asserting that congenitally disabled people were being punished for being wicked in a previous life, he was sacked. It is hard to figure out what Mr Hoddle’s religion was, but it was not Christianity.

The fundamental and essential Christian doctrine is based upon the fall of man, upon a mythical version of man’s early history. The evolution of man should hardly need considering in refutation of this. Only the utterly ignorant could make this the main question in the conflict between science and Genesis. A geological accident, the formation of flint, led to the recording in every age of our technical level. Flint implements faithfully reflect our intelligence. They are immortal and unalterable. Millions can be found beginning about two million years ago. Ten thousand years ago the human race was still in the Stone Age—stone weapons, skin clothing, elementary agriculture and pottery.

The scientific record of slow human development is fatal to the truth of Eden and the fall, necessary for the Christian doctrine of atonement. Paul, on whom theology is based rather than on the gospels, was wrong. The primeval curse is a myth discredited by what science knows about early man, and a divine redeemer of the race is superfluous.

Christians retreating from Fundamentalism to extremely liberal Christianity take up every possible position between, and some, like Mr Hoddle, that have not yet been thought of. None of these positions are logical or defendable. The “Sermon on the Mount” taken out of context is no more than a set of simple rules that are less complete and so less convincing than, say, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Indeed, because the Christian ethic was so lacking, early Christians took much of Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics as their own. Modernist Christians who take this postion are really modern Stoics, and ought to admit it. These liberal Christians should remember that they reject the theory and practice of Christianity, except insofar as it is Stoic, and so should not airily say that science does not conflict with religion because it does not conflict with theirs.

Rogue Scientists

Some scientists still profess an active Christianity. Either they have squared the circle, or they are pandering to Christian pressure from people ignorant of the facts but led by professional rabble rousers mainly with personal gain in mind. Instead of appealing to the public for support, and sending these primitives away with a flea in their ear, they seek conciliation by saying science is consistent with religion.

In the last century, McCabe tells us Sir E Ray Lankester, a zoologist, was an agnostic with no religious sentiment. When he said that science was consistent with religion he meant with the ethical teaching of Christianity. Even of this he knew little, and on one occasion was turned down by the editor of an annual to which he had made a contribution. The case is typical of one type of scientific apologist for Christianity. In the absence of any explicit confession of Christian belief in the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection, by “religion” they mean an ethical idealism or a belief in some kind of supreme entity, even if it has withdrawn into its transcendency after making the universe. So, when anyone says there is no conflict between science and religion, do what any philosopher would do in any case except one likely to belittle Christianity—ask what they mean by religion!

Professor Millikan, whose famous oil drop experiment is still taught in schools was gushing: “I have never known a thinking man who did not believe in God. Men who have the stuff in them which makes heroes all believe in God”. Now chaplains have reported that nine-tenths of American soldiers would have nothing to do with God. So we have a method here of picking out only the very best, the most thoughtful and bravest of soldiers, and saving the nation 90 percent of its army payroll bill, and reducing the nation’s superstitious inclinations.

Conflict between science and religion is impossible, he says, because the business of science is to accumulate knowledge and the business of religion is “to develop the consciences, the ideals and the aspirations of mankind”. If this development of consciences and ideals is religion, its sufficient motive is in this present life not in the wishes of an absolute nonentity. If there is a danger of human extinction through misuse of science, which is looking more and more likely unless our ideals are developed, we really have some incentive to developing them. No need here to invoke anything supernatural.

If Millikan’s theism is open to conflict with science, his own pretentious arguments are as clear as mud. He writes:

The more we investigate, the more we see how far we are from any real comprehension of it all, and the clearer we see that in the admission of our ignorance and finiteness we recognize the existence of a Something, a Power, a Being in whom and because of whom we live and move and have our being—a Creator by whatever name we call Him.

In English, Millikan is saying a Creator exists because we are ignorant. Here is a man with a permanent name in science wading in waters too deep for him. He wants to say something like:

Despite our scientific searches, we are still ignorant about how or why we exist. Yet, if the complexity of Nature can defeat the powers of comprehension of our best brains like me, there must be a cleverer Power or Being responsible for Nature, and it is God.

The work that Professor Millikan has done in physics came after only a century of accumulated research. If God is the Ancient of Days, He has had a much longer time than mankind to get clever. That Millikan should imagine that human scientists would know everything in only about 100 years of enquiry, is symptomatic of some form of megalomania. What will science know about the “powers” of the universe in ten centuries time? What will it know a million years from now? Millikan wants to have a clear reason why we exist, and because he has not, he sees existence as a mystery. He is begging the question. If we have evolved, then there is no question of a creation, yet because he will not consider that we have evolved, a creator becomes necessary for him. Millikan allows his own concept of the “Something” to evolve into a “Being” in five words, and having found himself with a being he refers to it as “Whom” and “Him”. He created God in his own head a lot quicker than God created the world.

Millikan is again calling on the “God of the Gaps”. He is trying to do what theologians have done since science started to tread on their corns. Whatever science cannot explain must be due to God. Millikan seems to see too much complexity for him to understand and so God must be behind it. Every advance the scientist makes dislodges the theologian from a patch of “ignorance”. Conflict is impossible, he says, because the business of science is to develop knowledge, and the business of religion is to develop ideals, and forthwith he makes his religion a business of getting knowledge in parts of the universe which science has not yet illumined! Every lamp lit in a dark chamber displaces fear of ghosts. The conflict is continuous, essential, and to the death.

He goes on to say materialism is “altogether absurd and utterly irrational,” because “love, duty, and beauty” are spiritual things, and tracing these back to his “Power behind Nature,” he concludes that this Power is spiritual and personal. Who says they are spiritual? He does, but psychologists say love is an emotion. Duty is an abstract word for a sense of obligation. Beauty is an abstract word for aspects of material things that please us. Christians and other rogues of the mind use the abstractness of these concepts to suggest that they must exist in another world—that of the spirit. Simple people can easily be fooled that, because abstract concepts cannot be touched, they must be spiritual, but intellectuals should not be, and, if they seem to have been, then they are not intelligent after all, or they are trying to gull others and so are dishonest.

A manual on the protozoa by Professor Calkins had, on the title-page:

Read this book and learn from it how great God is even in small things.

Professor Calkins' book describes the life and activities of the protozoa, including their responsibility for disease and death, and we are asked to see the finger of God in it. Such men, who use empty and discredited pulpit arguments, are sad but deserve no sympathy, for they still get away with it and their churches extract megabucks from the bereavement of widows no less than they have always done. Ingersoll, who was called a “superficial” man by people such as these, was asked by a young lady hoping to make a point: “Colonel, who made these beautiful flowers?” He replied: “The same, my dear young lady, that made the poison of the ivy and the asp”. Why should a “spiritual power” make flowers and birds of paradise? Why indeed should a spiritual power and the Power of Love put scorpions, poisoned thorns, ebola virus in the path of the children they love.

Social Progress

The vaguest, and therefore most valuable, of the claims of the religious apologist is that religion, the Christian religion in particular, is the progressive principle of modern civilization, that the bible is the source of England’s (or America’s or Germany’s) greatness. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century Chinese civilization was probably superior to the Christian, and the Christian only began to make rapid progress and surpass China at the time when they began to discard their Christianity.

Historically it is absurd to couple together the words Christianity and progress, and if you seek for elements in primitive Christianity that make for social progress, or might do, you see at once how incongruous the claim is. The general argument is based crudely on two facts: the material or economic progress of Christian nations since the fifteenth century which quite obviously has nothing to do with any religion, and the social, moral, and intellectual progress of the last sixty or seventy years, which coincides with, not a revival, but a decay, of religion.

In connexion with all historical claims of the beneficent action of the Christian religion or any religion, keep in mind four periods of history—Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, Rome in the first and second (and even fourth) centuries of the present era, Arabian and Moorish civilization from the tenth to the fifteenth century, and the modern period from about 1850 onward. These non-Christian periods were brilliant and progressive. In comparison with these essentially irreligious periods, the record of Christendom is ugly and barren. It was these other idealisms, of Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Moors, that counteracted the benumbing influence of Christ’s teaching in Europe and led the world back to the paths of progress.

The advance of science is the chief factor, both in its immense multiplication of our resources and in its stimulation of the imagination, and religion has had nothing whatever to do with it. Education is the second factor, and it was initiated chiefly by non-Christians, largely opposed by the Churches, and only successful when the secular states undertook it. Not even in our moral and social progress, our new idealisms and philanthropies, is it possible to trace religious influence. Humanitarianism was the impulse, and the roots of this go back through the French Revolution and the Deists to the Renaissance and the Moors.

Christian critics say that a social theory of morals may, when it is properly embodied in education, make people just, honest, truthful, and so on, but that there are finer shades or graces of character which religion alone will sustain. The social theory of morals means that characteristics and behavior that are desirable and promote pleasantness and mutual welfare are worth cultivating. Our “graces” and refinements of character are either not desirable or we will retain them because we like them. With proper education of the young, these are the easiest things for public opinion to enforce.

The art of living is to be one of the great lessons of the Adelphiasophists: how to obtain as much happiness as one can during our few decades of sunshine, consistently with the happiness of others—how to find, as the Greeks and Moors found, the just balance of intellectual, emotional, and sensual life. The world has never known such a volume of unselfish service of the less fortunate, not least in the USA. Not out of the decaying creeds have educational, philanthropic, helpful organizations emerged, but out of a feeling of sisterhood and brotherhood, of sympathy, of humanitarianism—of kinunity.

Science and Belief

The Lion Manual called Science and Belief has been mentioned several times. It is typical of Christian books about science—it has nothing essentially to do with it. Yes, it describes certain aspects of science in a bland way that no one would object to in a science book that was honestly explaining how science works, but the intention here is to imply that science is only partial and sadly lacking. Only a belief in a supernatural being called God can explain everything.

An example is that it describes Hertz aiming to show that radio waves are of the same nature as light waves and therefore obeyed Maxwell’s equations. He tried to find out whether they travelled at the same speed and found they did not, suggesting that radio waves were not electromagnetic waves like light. Later it was discovered that Hertz had failed to realize that the dimensions of his laboratory were such that standing waves were set up and their interference pattern spoiled his results. Eliminating the problem, the radio waves were found to travel at the speed of light. This is a useful cautionary tale for science students, but Poole hopes to imply by it that scientists are missing the most important factor of all—God!

A second’s thought shows that in the whole history of science and the longer one of religion, there has never been an instance like the Hertz experiment where an overlooked factor turned out to be God. Christian apologists, always invoke God by analogy, and unformed minds might find the analogies convincing when more experienced adults would laugh at them. As Laplace said to Napoleon, “God is a hypothesis of which I have no need!” Nor has anyone since. Laplace was a religious man but was what Poole is not—honest. He knew that whatever God was, he was not wiggling his index finger in human affairs, and in practice was irrelevant to mankind.

Poole defies all of history by trying to make out that “religious belief encouraged science”. In so doing he admits that the former reverence for Nature held by ancient societies was destroyed by the Judaeo-Christian bible.

In Christianity Nature was demoted from being an object of worship. It was untamed and needed to be subdued.

Of course, that does not mean “exploit,” he chirps, overlooking the fact that it meant precisely that and still does, but Christians like him would rather write worthless apologetic than do something useful. Appropriately Poole quotes a prayer by James Clerk Maxwell here:

Teach us to study the works of Thy hands that we may subdue the earth to our use, and strengthen our reason for Thy service.

Frankly, it makes an Adelphiasophist cringe. Christianity helped science because “a lot of clergymen were scientists”. It is rather like saying the Ku Klux Klan helped the fight against slavery because some southerners were against it. Clergymen had some education, a reasonable income and plenty of time on their hands, so some of them took to science as a hobby and made useful contributions. To extend this into “a partnership of Christianity and science” as Poole does simply serves to show his undisguised bigotry and dishonesty. Christians typically will claim credit for anything as soon as they can find one of their creed who supported a good cause, even if the remainder and the official churches fought it tooth and nail.

At this point appears a box in which a long quotation from a Professor Colin Russell is given in which he pejoratively describes the opponents of Christianity of the nineteenth century as…

…a concerted attempt tp replace conventional religion (which deals with the supernatural) by a world view that involves Nature and Nature only.

They sound quite wonderful to us. “Mother Nature” was “a substitute for God”. “Its aim was the secularization of society”. It is all transparently shock-horror for innocents who think religion will tell them something about the supernatural it apparently “deals with”. It is a fraud because, as the Marx brothers realized but Christians cannot, there “aint no Santa Clause”.

Russell says the work of these scientists, many Fellows of the Royal Society, was “literature that is today almost universally regarded as worthless…” Unlike Christian works. His “universally” means “by Christians”. One such book was A D White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, a book well worth reading today. Poole’s Science and Belief, proves that this warfare is still continuing from the Christian side, otherwise his book would not be necessary. It is not the fault of Christians because if the scientists would only cease to contradict them the war would stop! Christians simply do not like to be contradicted. That is why there is warfare.

Right and Wrong

Poole now tells us that science is “imagined” as the final court of appeal for judging all other knowledge, and it could not have got there except through its success. Despite that it can tell us nothing about God. This is called a “limitation” of science. Note that in all of this assertion, Poole does not tell us what religion can tell us about God. The religious people of the world might say there is a God. Skeptics reply that there is not a shred of evidence there is a God, so to believe in one is pure self-deception. Christians assert, skeptics look for evidence. These are two fundamentally opposed attitudes to life, and they are irreconcilable. It is quite impossible to believe without any evidence and to demand evidence before believing. Poole is not fairly comparing the merits of the two attitudes, understandably, because simply believing for no reason is indefensible. So, he leads the readers of his tendentious nonsense to doubt science while leaving no more than an impression that religion can offer something more.

He now says one of the questions science cannot answer is whether something is right or wrong. That is a dubious assertion, as well as implying, without any substantiation, that religion can. Astonishingly, though, Poole gives as an example Robert Boyle who refused to make known some of his chemical discoveries because he thought they would be used for mischievous purposes. Boyle refused to use his inventions because of the scientific knowledge he had of them, even though the knowledge itself was not a direct answer to the question. What similar can religion offer? The Romans were said to have refused to develop steam power, even though they were aware of it and used it in temples to automatically open doors, for example, because it would have made millions of slaves redundant. Was that decision right or wrong? Religion is no better at asnwering such questions than science, in fact rather poorer.

Ultimately, from the theory of evolution, the purpose of any species is to propagate itself, and so what is right is what allows us to do this. It is not what secures us the psychological comfort of an imaginery eternal existence. To continue to “subdue” the earth, or to destroy animals and plants upon which we might subtly depend, cannot be right, because it will lead to our extinction. The Christian religion cannot even get to realize that our existence in the world we know is the only one we are likely to have and should be valued above any fantasy existence in the bosom of a fantasy being.

More assertions of no value follow. Science is concerned with mechanisms but religion is concerned with meaning. “Why am I alive?” is the question used to illustrate this distinction. Science explains what processes or mechanisms allow us to live but religion explains the purpose of life. What then is it? Er…

At this point appears another box about “Logical Positivism”. Logical positivism simply says that only empirical knowledge is practically valuable to us. This outlook bluntly says that speculation such as that of religion is utterly valueless until it finds some empirical base. That is why Christians do not like it, and try to misrepresent it. It supposedly destroys the basis of science because the assumptions upon which science is built are not empirical. That is absurd. It is like saying aeroplanes cannot fly because they are heavier than air. Whether we know the underlying physics or not, it is plainly true that aeroplanes can fly. The success of science shows that its underlying assumptions are true. They began as assumptions (working assumptions) but the continued successes of the enterprise could only continue if the assumptions are true. They have actually been verified empirically.

The claim to logic is the basis of the criticism of logical positivism, and that is because it cannot be included in the set of knowledge that it prescribes. The assertion that “only empirical knowledge is of practical value to us” excludes itself because it is an assertion not an empirical finding. Christians therefore say it falls on its own sword and so must admit God once more into the equation. Yet logical positivism in practice leads us into a virtuous circle of unfolding knowledge, whereas belief in God leads us to spallation and confusion precisely because it has no empirical yardstick, and ultimately every believer has a personal God and a personal religion. Christianity is shot through with fallacies, assumptions and downright lies, so logical positivism by comparison is heaven.

A professor Malcolm Dixon is quoted as saying:

There are more disagreements and contradictions within science itself than there are between science and religion. Conflict between rival views is quite common in science.

Profound, eh? No, but meant to be misleading. The aim is to give the impression that science is arbitrary. This is a Christian slander. Christianity is arbitrary, that is why there are so many Christian sects. There are disagreements and contradictions in science while the scientific view is being established by observation and experiment based on hypothesizing. Once established the agreed view becomes that of the body of knowledge called science. The agreed view in science in many fields is stable and not subject to change. Anyone can disagree with it, but, to repeat, science is not opinion. Disagreements have to hold water and we are sure that many fields of scientific learning are established. At the boundaries of knowledge there are disagreements because through them science progresses, and the greater a field gets, the greater its boundaries.

What of the disagreements between science and religion? There is only one. Science is true, religion is false! Poole keeps saying that science and religion give different types of explanations, again trying to persuade us that they have their own domains of effectiveness. The two domains are truth and lies. What religious truth has ever been established? The intended readership of this kiddies book are being browbeaten. He repeats incessantly that science cannot tell us why the universe exists, meaning for what purpose. The reader deduces that religion does. It does not. It asserts that a superbeing called God made it, and any such assertion tells you nothing! A far better religious hypothesis than the Christian one, and one held by many people at one time, is that the Devil made the world we inhabit. To see the world as obviously evil, makes more sense than Christianity, and the explanation is supernatural. Why then are we to believe the Christian explanation? Because they say so!

Poole says that science can explain perfectly well the best way to cure a bacterial illness, say, but it cannot give the knowledge of a personal kind required to make a friendship—or rather, realising perhaps that this is nonsense, has to add the stupid qualifier “atom-and-molecule explanation”. He realizes that someone who is having problems making friends probably needs the help of a psychologist or even a psychiatrist and has to crudely exclude them. They are the scientists that can offer solutions. He expects a child not to notice his trickery.

Poole now takes us on to what he calls “nothing buttery,” or reductionism. He wants to be able to argue that scientists say things like, “Human beings are nothing but a collection of atoms”. Or, because that is a bit crude he puts it in one place like this: “If we are just accidents then… “ The word “just” replaced the “nothing but”. Scientists know far more than any Christian apologist that we are not “nothing but” atoms or “just” accidents, or whatever, because scientists are the people who are tring to find out what we are. If it were not for scientists, Christians would not have been able to use words like “atoms” in this context.

If scientists have used expressions like this, it has been to emphasize that there is nothing “supernatural” about these things, not that the whole is not greater than its parts. If that were a view seriously held by scientists there would be no point in doing anything other than analysing composition. The Christian is desperate to hold on to the fancy of a soul, in fact “nothing but” a metaphor for life itself—when the soul departs we die. Since Christians have not the courage to face up to death they pretend that when life ceases it goes somewhere else. This university lecturer is trying to dupe young people by denigrating scientists as fools, and elevating mythology into truth. His colleagues should be demanding his sacking.

Explaining Away

The sheer brazen audacity of Christians like Poole defies belief. His next section is about “explaining away”. Explaining away all the absurdities of the New Testament, one might imagine. But no! Scientists explaining away religious experiences is what he means. What would be considered personal prejudices, if they were matters of race, for example, are touted by Christians as true beliefs! These apparently are what scientists want to explain away. Just to make sure that explanations are not admissible he discounts psychological answers!

Some would like to know what happened to the dead saints that rose from the tomb in Matthew’s gospel. Why did they not become leading evangelists with an irrefutable proof of the truth of it all—they had been dead but lived? Where are they now? Resurrection is into eternal life supposedly. Why do they not come forward as still living proof of the message of Christianity? Indeed, if Jesus also rose from the dead, why did he waste his time ascending to heaven to sit on the right hand of God when he could have spent an eternity of life converting skeptics? Ask any Christian these, and they have no choice but to explain it away, because the basis of their belief, that God wanted to atone for the sins of the whole human race, would demand that he did the utmost to persuade humanity it was so—He had made a rule that only through believing could salvation be gained. That being the case, to do less than was possible to persuade people to believe can only be seen as wicked—except by a Christian.

More sections follow that say nothing about religion but are a sort of brain washing, meant to incline the youngsters toward the Christian myth. Finding the Truth, Causes and Grounds and Proof lead on to A Matter of Faith. Again utter brazenness emerges when he tells us that “credulity” means being too ready to believe when there is insufficient or contrary evidence. The difference is the evidence! And the evidence for Jesus is historical! That’s it!

Next we have a long interlude on Galileo meant to show that there was more to the the affair than simply science against Christianity. Personalities were involved too, quite naturally, and Galileo remained a Catholic throughout, unsurprisingly. Even as a Catholic he was threatened with torture. So he recanted, and the church had its way that the earth was at the centre of the world, not the sun. If it is not a conflict between science and belief, then why did the church behave as if it were?

Moving on to Darwin, Poole tells us it was not a question of conflict between science and religion because many of the scientists were religious. You might have noticed the goal posts shift rather markedly. It would not be too surprising that clergymen who were amateur scientists would support Christianity against a professional scientist. Poole actually quotes someone called Dr James Moore as saying:

It was a few theologians and many scientists who dismissed Darwinism and evolution.

And therefore a few scientists and many theologians that supported him? Poole plays down the role of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who adversely reviewed the hypothesis, and the clash between Wilberforce and Huxley, called Darwin’s Bulldog, at a BAAS meeting in 1860, claiming it was not even reported in the newspapers. The fact remains that Wilberforce led the attack, and the church was setting itself against a scientific advance that it saw as troublesome.

Because of the mechanism of evolution, which is the competition for life, God seems to be working through a rather cruel law. He creates new species through starvation and predation. Christians are quite unable to answer this and are forced to fall back on applying it to humans where they attribute the need for it to free will. Poole tells his young readers that no one can be forced to love someone else. It is a meaningless combination of words, and he quotes Clive Staples Lewis again to prove it:

Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.

A fine piece of advice, one might think, but one that Christians, even Lewis, do not live by. If God had created his world to live in harmony from the beginning, then how is that forcing anyone to do anything? “Nobody misses what they have never had,” is an old saying. If we had never had free will, how could we have missed it, and how would the love in the world then be forced? As it is we are forced to swat flies, kill snakes and protect ourselves against robbers and murderers. People are so averse to this state of affairs that they have always cherished the idea of heaven where love is obligatory. God could have made it so in the first place according to Christians because He is omnipotent. The whole ragbag is shot full of holes from beginning to end, and yet these clappies find merit in it.

Poole discusses Genesis but his answers are puerile, because he is addressing children, he will claim. The two creation stories in Genesis are contradictory but that “does not necessarily follow”. Unfortunately, it does, and no one except Fundamentalists will deny it. The same goes for the making of men in the “image” of God. An image is a copy or likeness of external form, but Poole tells the young people it is a copy of the spirit. God is described in the bible as having a human form, so within itself it is consistent but, dishonest Christians would rather lie than accept the obvious. This is the explaining away that Christians object to scientists doing. “Do as I say not as I do,” has always been the central motto of practical Christianity.

Coming towards the end of the book with an air of desperation, Poole writes:

Although evolution does not show there is a creating God, it certainly does not show there is not.

He has another of his heroes, Professor Sam Berry, supporting him:

The most persistent misapprehension about God and creation is that knowledge of a causal mechanism automatically excludes any possibility that God is acting in a particular situation.

It is hard to believe that these people are scientists at all. Whether God or Harvey the Rabbit is supposed to be helping out in creation is not pertinent to the scientists simply because there is no evidence that either is, nor any need to suppose they are. That they have to cling to their obsessions takes us back to the psychology of religion. They are obviously deluded but why is their belief so obsessive? What do they get out of it, and out of trying to force it through absurd books on to innocent and, as yet, sane youngsters. It is like the control-freak mother who tells her child what to like and dislike, so that the child grows up with bizarre and stultifying habits and tastes. There is a hint here of some sort of hidden perversion that has been the cause of untold harm in the world.

Scientific Christianity?

Dr Arthur Peacocke tells us that religion is the search for meaning, and contrasts with science which merely provides models for us to manipulate our environments. Peacocke thinks these two tasks, the scientific search for intelligibility and the religious search for meaning, should be integrated at our universities, yet he openly admits that theology cannot be pursued with intellectual honesty and integrity, so far as “unbelieving contemporaries” and “cultured despisers” are concerned. Science seemed solid rock while theology seemed like shifting sand. The authoritarian claims based on the bible or the opinion of some distinguished cleric that Christianity has used to impose its views on ignorant people cannot be validated from anything external that is universally accepted. Quite so.

Scientists describe what they observe, and the consistency and reproducibility of their observations are best explained by something real causing them. Peacocke himself has earlier noted, with apparent approval, the words of Conrad Lorenz:

Our sense impressions must be broadly trustworthy, and so must the cognitive structures whereby we know the world—otherwise we would not have survived.

These cognitive structures represent external reality for us, and must be true enough to allow us to survive in real environments. Hypotheses then explain the observations, and they explain reality to the extent that observations coincide with reality. Peacocke concedes:

Realism is still the majority view of philosophically-informed practising scientists who would not pursue their exacting profession if they did not think they were uncovering real aspects of the underlying mechanisms and relationships in the natural world.

Science might not be as solid as rock but is far more solid than quicksands!

Science challenges other humanist disciplines, including theology, to live up to its epistemological standards in relation to the data and intellectual histories relevant to them.

Peacocke wants to find a response to this admitted truth from the theologian’s viewpoint, but he has immense difficultiy in doing it. The language of devotion, liturgies and doctrine are not compatible with a world the long term events of which are accurately described by cosmology, geology, biology and evolution. Peacocke wants:

1. a God which can embrace science about the cosmos, this planet and our own and other species;
2. a dynamic view of God’s continuous action in the processes of the natural world;
3. a notion of God developed by argument and imagination;
4. a God who is indeed transcendent, incarnate and immanent, in whom the world exists and who is its circumambient reality;
5. theology—defined as wisdom and words about God—which develops concepts, images, notions, metaphors that represent God’s purposes and meanings for the world we actually now find it to be through the sciences.

Quite how he expects to get this absurd set of requirements fulfilled he does not say, so we have to assume it is by faith. Science can have nothing to do with it. Yet Peacocke is determined to maintain his scientific cover. He thinks what he calls “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE), a hypothesis about scientific method invented by one Peter Lipton, will be the miracle he seeks. Peacocke gives no explanation of the value of this theory, or how it differs from other theories, but he likes it as a basis for theology. It stands to reason that any set of observations can be explained by a variety of hypotheses. Peacocke is interested here in which is the best of them. His answer is that it must be the one that is:

1. comprehensive—it explains a lot of data;
2. fruitful—it leads on to new discoveries or investigations;
3. fits in with previous explanations in different fields;
4. coherent and therefore not contradictory;
5. elegant.

Whatever Lipton might be saying in general, Peacocke is saying nothing new here. These are the characteristics of good scientific hypotheses anyway, so quite what the acronym IBE stands for that is new is still not explained. Peacocke says the discussion of these features…

…has been grist to the mill of the last few decades of the philosophy of science.

Well, Lipton’s book on IBE was only published in 1991, so these features preceded the Lipton hypothesis, it seems. Maybe so. Peacocke congratulates himself for having proposed the same thing as early as 1979, and so he is being generous in letting Lipton seem to have the credit.

So, we get to the point. Theology has been weighed “in the balance and found wanting”. An apt way of putting it. So, Peacocke asks:

Dare theology, by using IBE, enter the fray of contemporary, intellectual exchange and stand up and survive in its own right? To do so, it has to become an open exploration in which nothing is unrevisable.

At present theology is dominated by unacceptable methods:

1. The authority of the bible. Most Christian punters insist on this, yet the bible is ancient, inaccurate and has manifestly been multiply revised, proving that the Holy Ghost could not make up his mind what had to be written down!
2. The authority of experts who invent their own language and truths without reference to the external world except for the above mentioned ancient and well edited book. It is therefore arbitrary and has lost relevance to the developing world.
3. a priori truth. No one can today accept any such truth. All are culturally conditioned unless they are verified by the scientific method.

For Peacocke, a modern theology has to accept:

1. science,
2. claimed previous Jewish and Christian revelation,
3. the traditions of other religions.

These require a radical revision of what Christians hold as credible, defensible and reasonable. Indeed, Peacocke soon shows that his conception of Christianity has nothing other than the name in common with the relgion Christians currently practise. Peacocke churns out provocative questions for Christians. Is God omniscient or is He conditioned by certain natural restrictions that simply cannot be broken? If God Himself is subject to the impossibility of seeing the future like the rest of us, does He experiment? Is that the reason why He invented evolution? What is the meaning of eternal life on a new earth made at the end of time when science suggests that the earth will die out for good and all? Is not much of Christian eschatology but empty speculation?

God is closer to natural reality than previously conceived. Peacocke denies the supernatural and therefore the independent spirit or of the soul of human beings. Since death is now plainly seen to be natural, how can “the wages of sin be death”? Nor can God be thought of as stirring His finger in the affairs of the world which He has arranged to be astonishingly subtle and rational. This precludes miracles, certainly so far as the ones normally cited are concenrned. Peacocke asks:

• Should Christians be bound to believe the virgin birth in view of the weakness of the historical evidence for it, its biological implausibility and its reduction of the humanity of Jesus?
• Should Christians believe the Resurrection when our bodies are not resurrectable once our constituent molecules enter those of other living organisms and other people, and so Jesus’s body leaving an empty tomb could never give us any particular hope for our own resurrection?

Human beings seem to be “rising beasts” rather than “fallen angels”… Should we not now be regarding the work of Christ less as the restoral of a past state of perfection than as the transformation into a new as yet unrealised state?

The central question about such a radical revision of Christianity is why keep the notions of God and Christ at all. What is the point of keeping the baggage of ancient myths, when most of what goes with it is unsentimentally interrogated—and rejected—in the light of better modern methods of discovery. Why not just concentrate on what is known because it is testable and verifiable—namely science—and concentrate on that as a religion? It is called Adelphiasophism.

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