From the Sunday Telegraph: ‘Society is ill-prepared to handle scientific breakthroughs because it lacks understanding of human life, the Archbishop of Canterbury has claimed.’
No: the problem is that your 16th century church based on an iron-age set of texts can’t handle the modern world. And your church wilfully misleads people about science, as we are about to find out.
In his interview the Archbishop (who was unfairly handled in the whole Sharia law for the UK thing) sounds remarkably like a scientific ignoramus of the first water and as dishonest as the shrillest of American creationist liars in erecting strawmen and quote-mining:
Dr Williams said that evolution presented one of the biggest conflicts between religion and science and claimed that people have been misled by academics such as Richard Dawkins.
People who believe in an unproven God and promise their followers eternal life really shouldn’t throw stones about misleading.
“It’s a limited theory about certain limited phenomena which is very plausible as far as it goes but it’s not a complete philosophy.”
Biologists don’t claim it is, you pillock.
He argues that champions of neo-Darwinism
There is no such thing, except in the minds of under-siege creationists and their degraded spawn intelligent designers.
have oversold the theory as “a key which fits all locks and can tell you not only about evolution but where beliefs come from, what truth means”.
It’s wrong to lie, Archbishop.
Religion feels threatened by the consequences of evolutionary science: it inevitably challenges Genesis creationism, and with that the credibility of the opening cornerstone text of the Old Testament, also the Noachian flood and all that flows from that. Like the Christian biblical view of the origin of modern humanity. Which as the extensive fossil record of hominid evolution shows is wrong. That’s all they’ve got.
Evolutionary science, since Darwin sketched its outlines 149 years ago has added data upon data to support or discount theories around evolution. The church can offer nothing other than a five thousand year old text backed up by threats of hell and group mumblings under the authority of a man who really appears not to know what he’s talking about, but nonetheless does talk about it.
Archbishop Williams, widely regarded as an academic theologian of shining parts, now falls into a logic pit so deep he may pass Gandalf fighting the Balrog before he hits the bottom:
The archbishop will use a series of high-profile lectures this week to renew his call for people to pay more attention to the historical evidence supporting the Bible, rather than “ludicrous” conspiracy theories.
“People get away with extraordinary assertions about Christian origins,
Man was made of clay, woman from his spare rib. Parthenogenetic messiah is crucified, rises from the dead and is taken into heaven? Pretty extraordinary, verging on the mental.
which they have picked up from here and there, yet there is a mountain of research which is increasingly friendly towards the Gospels being reliable documents,” he said.
Our mountain about evolution is bigger than your mountain about the scriptures. Betcha.
“The Judas Gospel is a cardinal case and the sort of ludicrous, persistent Jesus-was-married-to-Mary-Magdalene sort of thing which keeps coming back in spite of the fact there is just nothing to go on it.”
So: evolution is ‘limited’ despite decades of rigorous, peer reviewed research which shines academic light mercilessly into the corners of theory and roots out and corrects errors (not by burning the perpetrators, though!). Whereas the inquiries into the veracity of the bible where there are contradictory sources and accounts (both in non-canonical scriptures and between the canonical scriptures)…nothing to it. Because I say so.
Oh and here we go:
‘We haven’t as a society got a sufficiently clear notion of what constitutes a human organism.’
Yes we have. Almost every person I know, including my Down’s Syndrome foster sister can tell the difference between a human organism, a fish organism and a dog organism. And that’s without going into the scientific literature. Just because we are more pragmatic about their definition and not prone to give credit to recently invented theologies about the sanctity of the blastocyst, it doesn’t mean our notions aren’t clear. Don’t patronise us by telling us what we do and don’t understand.
What the Archbish is dancing around is that Christanity’s obsession with sex and immediate products thereof. No I don’t mean sticky patches on the sheets (on which a gentleman should always offer to sleep), I mean embryos.
Scientists want to create human/animal hybrid embryos (altogether in the pews now: ‘Frankestein science!’) and this is one of the areas where Christians are obsessed. Obsessed.
Scientists want to use these embryos to do work on some pretty serious, unpleasant diseases. I spent a lot of time as a Catholic child being told suffering is noble, always by people who were conspicuously not suffering. At church every Sunday we prayed for the sick of the parish who were uniformly cured in hospital, by doctors and nurses whose expertise was informed by science not faith. I have seen many go to Lourdes and not one person has come back cured.
These scientists want - prayers having failed - to alleviate suffering now, not in an afterlife, and they should be allowed to get on with it. If Rowan Williams has not been sadly misrepresented in this interview, he knows little about science, sod all about evolution and is a far dimmer bulb than we had been led to believe.
Here’s the real rub. The internet has allowed atheists to find a community and call bullshit on the theists who seek to shove their noses into our lives, pockets, labs, bedrooms, minds, politics and civil liberties. That in turn has led to books, awareness raising, sometimes even organising. And we’re good at it. We’re often funny, irreverent, clever, rude, anarchic, ignore sacred cows. More and more, the religious assumptions of superiority and entitlement are being challenged AND THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ‘EM.
Tough. Get used to it. And butt out of science.
