Non-Overlapping Magisteria

I have just finished watching the Howard Jacobson programme on the Bible on Channel 4. I wish he would replace the phrase “fundamentalist atheist” with “reactionary atheist” or something similar – to claim that Dawkins’ atheism is “fundamentalist” is wilfully misleading. He also talked about people being certain in their doubt - it doesn’t make sense, since doubt precludes certainty. When I gave a talk in Leeds a couple of weeks ago I put up a slide showing Dawkins’ 7 point scale of belief. Out of a room of 19 people, 3 claimed to be a 7 on the scale – they “knew that there was no God” – this is an attempt to prove a negative which none of the “New Atheists” would have any truck with. This is just a mirror image of religious fundamentalism, an attempt to feel more emotionally secure in whatever you believe by claiming that your beliefs are 100% certain. Of course, being sure that something is the case does not imply absolute certainty. Following Bertrand Russell, I do not believe there is a china teapot in orbit around the sun between Earth and Mars, though I can’t prove there isn’t.
I was also irritated by Jacobson’s defence of the non-literal truth of ancient scriptures. In truth, the only reason that some, more sophisticated, religious people have not continued to believe in the literal truth of scripture has been the constant chipping away at their certainties by scientists and philosophers like Richard Dawkins and his intellectual predecessors stretching back to the enlightenment. The idea of NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) which was proposed by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould in his book Rocks of Ages and which Jacobson was advocating is a position that is adopted to offer religious believers an opportunity to continue with their religious beliefs without undermining science education – but this is to ignore what many religious people really believe as was shown in the documentary. If any real evidence for God or the supernatural was discovered by science, we can be sure that these NOMA people would drop it in an instant. It isn’t Dawkins and Grayling who are failing to undercover the truth of the matter – it is weak apologists like Howard Jacobson and Karen Armstrong who want to have their cake and eat it.

Omphalos

I attended the third Centre for Inquiry UK conference in London yesterday, entitled Science and Religion. The four speakers originally billed to speak were the biologist Jack Cohen, the science writer and broadcaster Simon Singh, CFI provost and conference regular Stephen Law and the philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. It wasn’t too much of a surprise to find that the octogenarian Warnock had to pull out at the last minute (ill health?) and Stephen Law had got TV psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud to fill in at the last minute. Raj Persaud was the last speaker and has been in the press recently for all the wrong reasons which I won‘t mention, but the audience soon warmed to him and he ended up giving what turned out to be a popular talk. I had seen Persaud before in Hull at the Humber Mouth Festival and the CFI talk was much better.
The first speaker at the morning session was Jack Cohen who has a link with Hull - he was undergraduate at the university of Hull in the 1950s. His presentation style was poor but he is 75. The subject of his talk was Omphalos which is the name of the book by the nineteenth century young earth creationist Philip Gosse. The book was published two years before Origin of Species and was an early attempt to reconcile the biblical story of God creating the world 6000 years ago and the discoveries of the true age of the earth as revealed by geology and the fossil record. Gosse’s crazy idea was illustrated by pointing out that God must have created Adam with a navel for him to be a normal human being. Of course, Adam was not born and so this "apparent" evidence of a developmental history involving an umbilical cord was a mere pretence. If you extend this idea to the whole of creation, then Gosse argues that God would have created a natural world with all the appearance of an ancient (evolutionary?) history , but in fact have created it at 6pm on 23rd October 4004 BC. Problem solved.
Simon Singh was the next speaker. I had been reading his book "Big Bang" on the train down. He is an engaging and gifted writer and his presentation was very entertaining. Stephen Law gave a talk about why he thinks it is obvious that there is no God by using a series of thought experiments involving an evil god. All good fun. I took the mic briefly with a question about free will and suffering. There was a crazy guy who the speakers had trouble shutting up as he rambled on about Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. No that wasn’t me. Another great conference - I am looking forward to the next one already.
Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Touched_by_His_Noodly_Appendage.jpg