Ukip Shipping Forecast

Further to my recent post challenging some of the country’s “top” theologians to say a word in public to denounce Ukip’s David Silvester’s decidedly Old Testament take on the recent storms and floods that have been battering the country, you can listen to a very amusing spoof edition by Nicholas Pegg of the Shipping Forecast here.

Ukip councillor David Silvester displays a disgraceful lack of ‘scholarship’ in the face of Britain’s recent floods. But will the ‘scholars’ actually correct him on it?

Ukip councillor David Silvester has recently drawn a link between meteorology and morality by publishing a letter saying that he warned prime minster David Cameron last year that Britain would face a spot of the old divine judgment for passing gay marriage laws that fly the face of the Bible’s teachings of a kind that The Right Reverend Graham Dow drew in response to the flooding in his North Yorkshire constituency in July 2007.  Silvester’s comments have been widely reported by the World’s media: BBC News, ITV News, Channel 4, The Daily Mail, Toronto Sun, London Evening Standard, The Huffington Post.

This from The Daily Telegraph’s report:

David Silvester, who defected from the Conservatives in protest at David Cameron’s support for same-sex unions, claimed he had warned the Prime Minister that the legislation would result in “disasters”.

The Henley-on-Thames councillor said that the country had been “beset by storms” since the passage of the new law on gay marriage because Mr Cameron had acted “arrogantly against the Gospel”.

In a letter to the Henley Standard he wrote: “The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war.

“I wrote to David Cameron in April 2012 to warn him that disasters would accompany the passage of his same-sex marriage bill.

“But he went ahead despite a 600,000-signature petition by concerned Christians and more than half of his own parliamentary party saying that he should not do so.”

Blaming the Prime Minister for the bad weather, he added: “It is his fault that large swathes of the nation have been afflicted by storms and floods.

“He has arrogantly acted against the Gospel that once made Britain ‘great’ and the lesson surely to be learned is that no man or men, however powerful, can mess with Almighty God with impunity and get away with it for everything a nation does is weighed on the scaled of divine approval or disapproval.”

In my recent post deriding theology as a proper academic discipline, I drew on my review of Christian apologist Peter S Williams’ response to the New Atheists, A Sceptic’s Guide To Atheism and criticised the theologians for being all theory and no practice:

Avoiding the real issues

Williams’ contribution is fatally flawed along with the other “flea” books by self-proclaimed “scholars”, because it only addresses barely a quarter of the arguments of the Four Horsemen, namely whether or not God exists, without saying a word in defence of the effects of organised religion on the world.

Unfortunately, religion is not just about the sophisticated ponderings of scholars in ivory towers debating the finer points of the Trinity.  It has an effect on every single one of us, whether we like it or not.

(…)

Like all theology and religious philosophising, Williams’ new book is all theory and precious little practice.  Accordingly, there is nothing about the foul rantings of Falwell and Robertson, the teaching of junk-science in schools classrooms, the destruction of the Twin Towers, the abuse of children by hell-fire preaching clergymen and the discouraging of condom use by the Catholic Church in sub-Saharan African where c. 3 million people die of HIV/AIDS each year.

The simple fact is that Williams’ subtle brand of nuanced religion has very little impact on the way that religion is actually practised.  Alistair McGrath got his feathers all ruffled in response to Dawkins and bleated on (at probably more speaking engagements than he was invited to in his career preceding publication of The God Delusion) about the importance of challenging those who take an overly literalist approach to the scriptures.

Yet when, in July 2007, the Bishop of Carlisle informed us all that the floods in Northern Yorkshire were divine retribution for laws permitting homosexual marriage did McGrath say a word in public to admonish the Right Reverend Graham Dow for his unsophisticated take on matters?  Like hell he did!

I believe that comments of the kind made by the Bishop of Carlisle and David Silvester would be perfect opportunities for “serious scholars” to confront head-on the “extremists” of their own faiths and show that they are prepared to police their religions rather than leaving it up to the godless heretics to do so in their “shrill” and “strident” fashion.

I have therefore sent the link to this post to four of the “fleas” who railed against the New Atheists for their supposed failure to engage with the best of Christian “scholarship” in their books: Alister McGrath (author of The Dawkins Delusion?), David Robertson (author of The Dawkins Letters), John Cornwell (author of Darwin’s Angel) and Peter S Williams (author of A Sceptic’s Guide To Atheism), inviting them to issue a public denunciation of Silvester of the kind they singularly failed to do in the face of the then Bishop of Carlisle’s shockingly unsubtle, Old Testament take on the situation.

I have also forwarded the post to the host Premier Christian Radio’s sceptical debate show, Unbelievable?, Justin Brierley and former opponents, Andy Bannister and Peter Harris.

My covering emails are in the comments section and I will publish any response I receive.

“Scholars”: Please prove me wrong so I can find another pastime.

Against Theology

This draft has been sitting in My Documents folder for quite a while.  Since I have recently been chided for my lack of serious “scholarship” (note the scare quotes) while debating on David Robertson’s blog on the question of whether Stalin was influenced by Darwin and evolution and my reply involved delving into this draft and copying any pasting the links and quotes, I thought that now would be as good a time as any to complete and publish the draft.

Some of most entertaining articles I have ever read have been those debunking theology.  There’s something so pompous and self-important about all theologians I have encountered.  When I first started reading the reactions to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, one of the more stinging comments was that he has not engaged in any serious Christian or Jewish theology.  No discussion of the finer details of the Trinity.  No dissection of the Transubstantiation.  As US evolutionary biologist, H Allen Orr, put it in his lengthy review:

[T]he result is that The God Delusion, a book that never squarely faces its opponents.  You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins’s book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?)…  Instead, Dawkins has written a book that’s distinctly, even defiantly, middlebrow.  Dawkins’s intellectual universe appears populated by the likes of Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Carl Sagan, the science populariser.

Richard, what were you thinking committing such a gapping hole in your research?

Nevertheless, Dawkins has hit back at this criticism both before and after the publication of his book.   Dawkins’ response to Oxford University’s Christian theologian Alister McGrath’s criticisms that he has a poor grasp of theology in his 2004 book, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes And The Meaning of Life:

Yes, I have, of course, met this point before.  It sounds superficially fair.  But it presupposes that there is something in Christian theology to be ignorant about.  The entire thrust of my position is that Christian theology is a non-subject.  It is empty.  Vacuous.  Devoid of coherence or content.  I imagine that McGrath would join me in expressing disbelief in fairies, astrology and Thor’s hammer.  How would he respond if a fairyologist, astrologer or Viking accused him of ignorance of their respective subjects?

The only part of theology that could possibly demand my attention is the part that purports to demonstrate that God does exist.  This part of theology I have, indeed, studied with considerable attention.  And found it utterly wanting.

Spot on.  Ninety-nine percent of all theology simply assumes that God exists; the content of the Bible is literally or metaphorically “true” and proceeds from there.  For an atheist to start arguing against the Trinity and assert that God is not one in three, but one in five would be to accept God’s existence implicitly and therefore contradict their core position!  Learned theological treatises among Christian theologians (and those of any other religion for that matter) have no more scientific or intellectual content than the discussion of Norse-like gods between Conan and his companion, Subotai, in Conan The Barbarian at the beginning of this post.  The cue to Basil Poledouris’ (wonderful) score is even called “Theology”!

Science blogger Jason Rosenhouse’s reply to Orr’s review, “Orr On Dawkins”, elaborates further:

Dawkins provides no serious discussion of Jewish or Christian theology?  Of course not, because such theology is mostly irrelevant to how religion is actually practiced.  Theology is an academic pursuit, and like many such pursuits it concerns itself primarily with esoterica far removed from people’s actual lives. Much Christian theology in particular tends to take the form of viewing the Bible as a complex cipher, one that requires years of training to understand properly.

And since Orr is criticizing Dawkins’ superficiality, it is a bit rich for him to reduce Augustine’s views to the slogan that he rejected biblical literalism.  Augustine did take the view that the Bible should be interpreted in as literal a way as possible, and in some of his writing he even endorsed a young-Earth position.  He was willing to countenance a somewhat allegorical interpretation of Genesis, but that was only because he felt the Bible should not be read in a way that contradicts what clear scientific evidence is telling us.  A worthy sentiment, certainly, but not one that finds much theological justification.

At any rate, Dawkins is perfectly aware that many serious Christians do not accept Biblical literalism.  So what?  Dawkins’ book is primarily about the reasonableness of believing in a creator God, and on the social impact of widespread religious belief.  The minutiae of different schools of Christian thought just isn’t the concern of this book.

The rest of this post will provide further resources and pithy sound bites giving this pseudo-intellectual non-subject that is needless contributing to the destruction of the rainforests and the worsening of climate change the respect it deserves.

Thomas Jefferson (quoted in The God Delusion [London: Transworld Publishers, 2007, p. 55]):

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity.  It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ:

Anyone with theologian blood in his veins will approach things with a warped and deceitful attitude.  This gives rise to a pathos that calls itself faith: turning a blind eye to yourself for once and for all, so you do not have to stomach the sight of incurable mendacity.  This universally faulty optic is made into a morality, a virtue, a holiness, seeing-wrong is given a good conscience, – other types of optic are not allowed to have value any more now that this one has been sanctified with names like “God”, “redemption”, and “eternity”.  I have unearthed the theologian instinct everywhere: it is the most widespread and genuinely subterranean form of deceit on earth.  Anything a theologian thinks is true must be false: this is practically a criterion of truth.

Sam Harris defines the God of the religious community at large:

We can talk about religion as it is for most people most of the time, or we can talk about what religion could be, or should be.  Or perhaps what it is for the tiniest minority of people…

If we talk about consciousness and the laws of nature, we won’t be talking about the God that most of our neighbours believe in, which is a personal god, who hears our prayers and occasionally answers them…

The God that our neighbours believe in is essentially an invisible person.  It’s a creator deity, who created the universe to have a relationship with once species of primate.  Lucky us!

He’s got galaxy upon galaxy to attend to but he’s especially concerned with what we do, and he’s especially concerned with what we do while naked.  He most certainly does not approve of homosexuality.  And he has created this cosmos as a vast laboratory in which to test our powers of credulity.  And the test is this: Can you believe in this God on bad evidence, which is to say on faith.  And if you can you will win an eternity of happiness after you die.

And it’s precisely this sort of god or this sort of scheme that you must believe in if you are to have any kind of future in politics in this country, no matter what your gifts.  You could be an unprecedented genius, you could look like George Clooney, you could have a billion dollars and you could have the social skills of Oprah, and you are going nowhere in politics in this country unless you believe in that sort of God.

So we can talk about anything we want – I’m happy to talk about consciousness – but please notice that when we migrate away from the God that is really shaping human events or the God-talk that is really shaping human events in our world at this moment.

Harris damns all theological discourse in Letter To A Christian Nation: A Challenge To Faith [London: Transworld Publishers, 2007, pp. 65 – 66]:

Consider the recent deliberations of the Roman Catholic Church on the doctrine of limbo.  Thirty top theologians from around the world recently met at the Vatican to discuss the question of what happens to babies who die without having undergone the sacred rite of baptism.  Since the Middles Ages, Catholics have believed that such babies go to a state of limbo, where they enjoy what St. Thomas Aquinas termed “natural happiness” forever.  This was in contrast to the opinion of St. Augustine, who believed that these unlucky infant souls would spend an eternity in hell.

Though limbo had no real foundation in scripture, and was never official Church doctrine, it has been a major part of the Catholic tradition for centuries.  In 1905, Pope Pius X appeared to fully endorse it: “Children who die without baptism go into limbo, where they do not enjoy God, but they do not suffer either.”

Can we even conceive of a project more intellectually forlorn than this?  Just imagine what these deliberations must be like.  Is there the slightest possibility that someone will present evidence indicating the eternal fate of unbaptized children after death?  How can any educated person think this anything but a hilarious, terrifying, and unconscionable waste of time?  When one considers the fact that this is the very institution that has produced and sheltered an elite army of child molesters, the whole enterprise begins to exude a truly diabolical aura of misspent human energy.

To finish with Sam Harris, here’s his summary of religious scientist Francis Collins’ true beliefs:

1.  Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days.

2.  He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven”—where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings.

3.  Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and skeptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on mother’s knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truth-claims ever revealed about the cosmos.

4.  Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will be consigned to a far less desirable fate, best left unspecified.

5.  In the meantime, God/Jesus may or may not intervene in our world, as He pleases, curing the occasional end-stage cancer (or not), answering an especially earnest prayer for guidance (or not), consoling the bereaved (or not), through His perfectly wise and loving agency.

How many scientific laws would be violated by such a scheme?  One is tempted to say “all of them.”

Richard Dawkins, “Let’s Hope It’s A Lasting Vogue”:

Athorism is enjoying a certain vogue right now.  Can there be a productive conversation between Valhallans and athorists?  Naïve literalists apart, sophisticated thoreologians long ago ceased believing in the material substance of Thor’s mighty hammer.  But the spiritual essence of hammeriness remains a thunderingly enlightened revelation, and hammerological faith retains its special place in the eschatology of neo-Valhallism, while enjoying a productive conversation with the scientific theory of thunder in its non-overlapping magisterium.  Militant athorists are their own worst enemy.  Ignorant of the finer points of thoreology, they really should desist from their strident and intolerant strawmandering, and treat Thor-faith with the uniquely protected respect it has always received in the past.  In any case, they are doomed to failure.  People need Thor, and nothing will ever remove him from the culture.  What are you going to put in his place?

Richard Dawkins, “The Emptiness of Theology”:

What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody?  When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious?  I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them.  I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false.  If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming.  If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference?  Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar-guided whaling vessels work!  The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything.  What makes anyone think that “theology” is a subject at all?

P Z Myer’s, “The Courtier’s Reply”:

I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship.  He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor’s boots, nor does he give a moment’s consideration to Bellini’s masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor’s Feathered Hat.  We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all.  He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D T Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk.

Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.

Personally, I suspect that perhaps the Emperor might not be fully clothed – how else to explain the apparent sloth of the staff at the palace laundry – but, well, everyone else does seem to go on about his clothes, and this Dawkins fellow is such a rude upstart who lacks the wit of my elegant circumlocutions, that, while unable to deal with the substance of his accusations, I should at least chide him for his very bad form.

Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor’s taste.  His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.

Paula Kirby, “Fleabytes”, (Special Topic: The Bible):

We are all familiar with PZ Myers’ inspired “Courtier’s Reply” to allegations of inadequate understanding of the Bible and theology, but there’s another angle to this issue, too, it seems to me, and that is that Dawkins and other atheists are deliberately refusing to take the Bible at anything more than face value.  At first glance this may seem deliberately obtuse but actually it is all part of stripping away the special treatment that has been accorded to faith in our societies.  We are just no longer prepared to read “Show him no pity.  Do not spare him or shield him.  You must certainly put him to death.  Your hand must be the first in putting him to death, and then the hands of all the people.  Stone him to death because he tried to turn you away from the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 13: 8-10, NIV) and pretend it means “God is love, God is good, God is moral.”

Likewise, when Dawkins argues that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually exclusive (thus provoking shrieks of indignation and scorn from Robertson in this letter), he is simply refusing to engage in the sort of wordplay and casuistry that allow theologians to twist and turn and claim “Ah yes, well, that’s not really what omnipotence means in this context.”  How many theologians have been kept gainlessly employed, how many trees have been felled, to produce and disseminate such sophistry?  And why should a book that requires such reams of debate, disagreement and interpretation before it can be held to make any sense be considered to be the Word of God, for goodness’ sake?

As a result, you don’t need your words to be interpreted, translated, or otherwise made comprehensible by even one go-between, let alone whole university faculties of them.  You are God, for God’s sake – you are perfect and omniscient and omnipotent.  You have the ability to create a book that will light up the world with its goodness and truth and unmistakably divine insight.  A book that will speak directly to any human being in whatever age they live.  A book that speaks incontrovertibly to the heart and mind of any being that opens it – and here’s the thing: EVEN IF THEIR THEOLOGY IS SHOCKINGLY BAD.

If it is necessary to read the Bible in a certain way, through a certain kind of lens, with a willingness to allow words to mean what they do not mean, and not to mean what they do mean; if it can only be made to be not offensive, not repellent, not meaningless after years of in-depth theological study, then your benevolent, all-powerful and all-knowing God cannot have viewed it as a particularly important way of getting his message across.  In which case, it’s hard to see why “evidence” based on it should be taken very seriously.

To conclude with my own contribution to this issue;reviewing Peter S Williams’ reply to Dawkins & Co., A Sceptic’s Guide To Atheism:

Avoiding the real issues

Williams’ contribution is fatally flawed along with the other “flea” books by self-proclaimed “scholars”, because it only addresses barely a quarter of the arguments of the Four Horsemen, namely whether or not God exists, without saying a word in defence of the effects of organised religion on the world.

Unfortunately, religion is not just about the sophisticated ponderings of scholars in ivory towers debating the finer points of the Trinity.  It has an effect on every single one of us, whether we like it or not.

I could concede every single word of Alvin Plantinga and say that there are good reasons to believe in God and Christianity and Christians are perfectly justified in doing so.  Hell, I could even go the whole nine yards and say that I actually do believe in God!  That I think that the virgin birth and the resurrection are as true as Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Hitler carrying out the Holocaust and Armstrong landing on the moon!

That still does not in any sense allow Christians to force their beliefs on others.  I cannot deny the existence of Joseph Stalin and Kim Jung Il, but at least I am not forced to obey them.  Even if the Christian doctrine was true, even if the evidence for it was much better, what right would that give Christians to force their beliefs on others?  Exactly the same right as liberals, conservatives and fascists: none whatsoever.

Although the theologians are called to defend religion at the debater’s lectern, ironically, they are not the people with whom I have my main quarrel.  If the theologians ran religion, it would be a far more benign entity and one that perhaps I could live with happily.  It’s not so much belief in ancient myths and fairy tales that angers me; it is the severely negative consequences that these unfounded beliefs have on the world.

If someone wants to believe in the Bible and live according to the teaching of Christianity I can’t stop that.  If they want to encourage other people to share in these beliefs, then I suppose I can’t stop that either.   What I do resent is the effects such unfounded beliefs have and their utter lack of negotiability.  If stopping the effects of religion means cutting it off at the roots and spoiling believers’ blissful ignorance and indulgence in ancient fairytales, then so be it.

Like all theology and religious philosophising, Williams’ new book is all theory and precious little practice.  Accordingly, there is nothing about the foul rantings of Falwell and Robertson, the teaching of junk-science in schools classrooms, the destruction of the Twin Towers, the abuse of children by hell-fire preaching clergymen and the discouraging of condom use by the Catholic Church in sub-Saharan African where c. 3 million people die of HIV/AIDS each year.

The simple fact is that Williams’ subtle brand of nuanced religion has very little impact on the way that religion is actually practised.  Alistair McGrath got his feathers all ruffled in response to Dawkins and bleated on (at probably more speaking engagements than he was invited to in his career preceding publication of The God Delusion) about the importance of challenging those who take an overly literalist approach to the scriptures.

Yet when, in July 2007, the Bishop of Carlisle informed us all that the floods in Northern Yorkshire were divine retribution for laws permitting homosexual marriage did McGrath say a word in public to admonish the Right Reverend Graham Dow for his unsophisticated take on matters?  Like hell he did!

That is all.

Podcast Interview for Skepticule

by

manicstreetpreacher

The clue is in the title.

Just a quickie this time to post the podcast of an interview I did for the blog, Skepticule.

I recorded it over Skype with Paul S Jenkins, who runs the blog, Notes from an Evil Burnee (because he’ll surely roast in hell), and who has posted some superb comments on my blog in recent weeks.

It lasts for about 20 minutes and we discuss my journey from passive agnostic to passionate atheist debating on Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable?, my live debates at Liverpool University and my online blogging and debating.

Further reading

Hitchens and Fry versus the Catholic Church: Post Mortem – manicstreetpreacher witnesses first-hand a rhetorical massacre of Vatican hench(wo)men by the cream of British intellectualism.

Merseyside Skeptics Society Lecture on Paranormal Experiences – 17/09/2009 – manicstreetpreacher learns about how the truth is not out there…  it’s up here.

Debates with David Robertson and Richard Morgan on Unbelievable? – manicstreetpreacher goes head-to-head with one of the most determined Christian opponents to the New Atheists.

More Than I Could Chew? – manicstreetpreacher licks his wounds after his encounter with a bunch of fundamentalists at Follow My Way, Liverpool University 12 March 2009.  The rest of the panel weren’t too rational either…

An Open Letter to Rabbi Y Y Rubinstein manicstreetpreacher enquires of a former recent debating opponent on a few points.  Such as whether there is any evidence outside the texts themselves for a group of half a million people being dragged around the desert for decades to the only place in the Middle East that has no oil.  And how could the scribes of the King James Version have botched up so badly that Yahweh has been transformed into a moral abomination…

Peter S Williams: Up Close – Part I – manicstreetpreacher’s review of I Wish I Could Believe In Meaning following his live debate with the author at Liverpool University, 19 February 2009.

Peter S Williams: Up Close – Part II – manicstreetpreacher’s review of A Sceptic’s Guide to Atheism following his live debate with the author at Liverpool University, 19 February 2009.

My Debates on Premier Christian Radio Against Theologian Andy Bannister – manicstreetpreacher’s afterthought piece on his first two formal debates on religion in the light of further research and online debate.  Make sure you check out the comments section at the end.  There are some very interesting responses, not least from my “scholarly” opponent himself…

A Coda in a Student Bar

manicstreetpreachers’ conversations with student members of Liverpool University Christian Union following his live debate against Peter S Williams on 19 February 2009.

On 19 February 2009 I spoke in a live debate against Peter S Williams of Southampton-based Christian group, Damaris, opposing the motion “Does the Christian God Exist?”   The YouTube links to the debate will follow.

Following the formal debate in the University Guild, members of Liverpool City Christian Union very kindly invited me to the student bar.  After I had finished my discussions with audience members at the venue, I took the City CU up on their offer and proceeded to the bar for another glass or two of red and to see if there was anyone else to argue with.

My opponent was there, but he had his own audience.  I sat among the students, who were all Christians, and continued the debate.

I was genuinely moved by some of their stories.  One young lady said that she had been cured of an ongoing illness through faith in Christ.   I could write reams about miracles and the placebo effect, but I’m not going to take that experience away from her.

Heaven?  Sounds like Hell to me!

During the audience Q & A in the debate, I had quoted Mark Twain’s pithy response to the spending an eternity with God after you die: “Most people can’t bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays.  How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity?”

One of the students admitted that church was a real drag, but heaven wouldn’t be like that because there was no longer any need to worry about your sins and repent – the reward was now yours.  I respect her opinion, but I’m not convinced by it.  When I’m gone I want to stay gone, but whilst I’m here I want make the most of everything so I won’t feel like I’ve missed out.

Not peace, but a sword

At one point I was grilled about my reference in the debate to Matthew 10:34, where Jesus assures his disciples that he came to bring “not peace, but a sword”.  The students had obviously never heard the line and couldn’t quite believe that it came from the mouth of Christ.   One of them accused me of taking the line “out of context”.

Where have we heard that one before, Andy Bannister?

I recounted the “context”, which is actually rather powerful and poetic, in which Jesus tells his disciples how to spread the word: “heal the sick, raise the dead…”  And then suddenly he comes out with that line about a sword.   I said that I do not pretend to know what the passage means.   The theologians have been keeping their children fed for the past 2,000 years trying to decipher the hidden meanings of the Bible and are still nowhere near reaching a consensus.   What chance does a heretic like me have?

At the end of the day, the line is there; it has survived thousands of years of transmission.   It exists in all our existing translations.  My own take on it is that Jesus knows that his new cult will cause divisions, disharmony, conflict.  You only have to glance at the following 2,000 years of Christian history to see how accurate a prediction it turned out to be.

An abusive relationship

I recently saw Jonathan Miller’s fascinating interview with Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Steven Weinberg, filmed as part of Miller’s television series, A Brief History of Disbelief.[i] “I don’t like God,” Weinberg explained, “He’s like a bad character in a novel, I really don’t like him at all.”   This is an extraordinary statement for a non-believer to make.  How can you hate something or someone you don’t believe exists?

Yet the more I think about, the more I agree with what Weinberg said.  God is a truly hateful character.  I tried explaining to a student at the bar that God was like an abusive partner.   He loves you and rewards you if you are good.  But when you anger him, he inflicts misery and pain upon you.   And just like a violent partner, he makes you feel as though you are the one to blame.

Why would anyone prostrate themselves at the feet of this sinister narrative?  As I said in the debate Q & A, the atheist’s view of evil is very straightforward: nature is the greatest abortionist.  Nature takes a million attempts to get things anywhere close to “right”.  Death, disease, pain, suffering; all part of the natural order.  It’s comforting for an atheist to know that it’s all random; that there’s no rhyme or reason to it.

I am amazed that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and the discovery of the true age of the Earth were not more readily accepted.  So some extent they still aren’t.   I would have thought that people would have said, “Great!  All the evil in the world is just part of the natural order!  There was death and suffering for millions of years before man arrived on the scene!   It has nothing to with Adam and Eve’s scrumping in the Garden of Eden 6,000 years ago.  Man never started in a perfect state and then rebelled against God.  It was just a sinister fairytale all along!  We are free!”

But, oh no, the solipsism of the theistic mind must go on.  The desire to be a slave is as strong as ever.  “We have to be responsible somehow!”

“God does not exist and I hate him!”

Finally, we discussed an event which took place some months before the debate, back in November 2008.  The City CU had held a Q & A session in the University Student Union entitled “Grill a Christian”.  As the name implies, it was an opportunity for atheists and believers alike to question a panel of Christians on the faith.

I attended with members of University of Liverpool Atheist Society and brought my “travelling” file of notes, which was filled with my own postings on blogs and debating forums.  I remember it was a day or two after I had recorded my debate against The Gods of War author, Meic Pearse, on religious conflict at Premier Christian Radio and I was still very much on a high following the clash.

In response one of the panel member’s assertion that hundreds of biblical prophesies have been fulfilled, I stood up and read aloud an extract from Victor Stenger’s God, The Failed Hypothesis which showed this claim to be spurious for want of corroborating evidence and the abject failure of numerous Old Testament prophesies.[ii] I have posted the extract once or twice on web forums and have not had a convincing response and that evening at Liverpool University was no exception.

I also issued Christopher Hitchens’ challenge on whether there can be a divine source to human morality:

Name a moral action committed or a moral statement uttered by a believer which could not possibly have been done or said by a non-believer.  Now name an immoral action done or a wicked statement uttered which could only have come from someone who thought they were on a mission from God.

Hitchens hasn’t had a satisfactory response to the first part of this challenge; nor have I for that matter and that particular evening proved to be no exception.  Tellingly, no-one ever hesitates over part two.

“You lot were angry that night!” one girl said to me, “What on Earth for?”  A very good question indeed: if it’s all just harmless nonsense, why bother opposing it so vehemently?

As I argue in my review of Williams’ A Sceptic’s Guide to Atheism, religion is not a benign superstition like astrology.  I find astrology rather irritating and intellectually vacuous.  It resembles faith-based religion in that it utterly solipsistic to imagine that the movements of celestial objects could ever impact on a human being.  Like religion, it is a result of homo sapiens’ natural tendency to believe that they are at the centre of the universe and there is an invisible agent dictating their lives in advance.

However, astrologers are not influential in our society at all.  True, the practice has unjustly enriched certain people I would rather were not on my television screen and in my newspapers such as Russell Grant and Mystic Meg, but as soon as someone seriously starts professing their belief in astrology, we tend to stop listening to them at best, or laugh directly in their faces at worst.

What happens to that doctor who says he won’t perform an operation that day because his Zodiac sign is in retrograde with the fifth moon of Saturn?  Either he or she does not get the job in the first place, or is discharged PDQ.   This is not the result of any government legislation; we have not passed laws preventing people from believing in astrology.  This is a result of what Sam Harris describes as the normal rules and restraints of human conversation.

On the other hand, when the president of the most powerful country in the World and the de facto leader of the free world declares that he invaded a foreign power on the advice of the creator of the universe, he automatically gains the legitimacy and approval from a majority of adults in his home country who are eligible to vote.

Does anyone else see a problem with this?

I replied to the girl in the bar, if religion was as benign an entity as astrology, I would leave it alone.  But this is simply not what religion is.  Religion intrudes on the daily lives of every person, whether they want it to or not, much less whether they like it to or not.

The same could be said for the ideology of any party in government that you did not vote for.   I take this caveat; however, political ideologies are constrained by original rules of evidence and reason.  Religion is, at present, not subject to these constraints.   We have all but extinguished bad political ideologies such as fascism and eugenics through scientific research, philosophical debate, and when all else has failed, through force of arms.

There have been countless wars fought either in the name of religion, or where religion has featured as a catalyst to hostility, countless books written denouncing it, countless debates held arguing against it.   Yet are we really anywhere close to extinguishing its harmful effects?  Not nearly as much as I’d like.

The glorious pursuit of failure

I hope that my debate against Peter S Williams will be the first of many.  I hope that meet tougher adversaries at the lectern.  I hope that I write many more papers such as this.  I hope that I provoke discussion, debate and controversy.  I hope that I have my own views scrutinised, challenged and reformed by my opponents.  I hope that my contribution to human conversation and the currency of ideas has some impact in moving religious faith further into the light of sceptical, honest and public discussion.  I hope that I inspire others to do the same.

I realise that this debate won’t be settled in anywhere like my own lifetime.  In a strange way, I’m quite happy with that.  I wouldn’t extinguish the belief even if I could.  If nothing else, it would be one less group of people with whom to argue.  (As for Muslim suicide bombers and fundamentalist Christians who murder abortion doctors and block stem-cell research, I don’t have any argument with them, in the same way that reasoning with a brick wall is a fruitless exercise.)

But as I closed my main address in the debate earlier that evening; this is a glorious struggle nonetheless and one that will last forever.

But it’ll be worth it.  And it’ll be a lot of fun.

---

Endnotes

[i]  The Atheism Tapes with Jonathan Miller (2004) 116 Films Ltd, Lorber HT Digital, 2008.

[ii] Stenger, V J. (2007). God, The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. (New York: Prometheus Books, 2008). 182 – 183.

Peter S Williams Up Close – Part II

http://www.arn.org/authors/williams.html

http://idpluspeterswilliams.blogspot.com/

manicstreetpreacher reviews A Sceptic’s Guide to Atheism by Christian apologist, Peter S Williams, following their live debate at Liverpool University on 19 February 2009.

On 19 February 2009 I spoke in a live debate against Peter S Williams of Southampton-based Christian group, Damaris, opposing the motion “Does the Christian God Exist?” The YouTube links to the debate will follow.

In preparation for the debate, I read many of Williams’ articles, listened to his debates and podcasts and read his two most recent books, I Wish I Could Believe In Meaning: A Response to Nihilism and A Sceptic’s Guide to Atheism: God Is Not Dead! The latter was not officially released until 27 February, over a week after our debate, but Mr Williams in all his good Christian nature emailed me the final proof in PDF a few days beforehand.

Unlike my earlier piece on my Premier Christian Radio debates against Andy Bannister, this essay is not intended as a “what I wish I’d said at the time”. Indeed, I am very happy with my performance against Williams. Of course there are a few things I would change if we were going to do it again, one or two places were I stumbled over my words, points I would like to have discussed more thoroughly if time had allowed, but for my first live debate I was more than happy with the way I acquitted myself.

These essays are to expand on points which were raised in the debate and to provide a fuller analysis of my opponent’s written work.

A Sceptic’s Guide to Atheism: God Is Not Dead![i]

This is marginally better than Williams’ last effort, I Wish I Could Believe In Meaning, if only because Williams doesn’t plumb to the depths of deliberately misrepresenting his opponents.  However, it suffers from the same problems of being saturated with quotes from other writers whilst not giving any inkling of what Williams himself actually believes.

Williams rightly points out that his book will be dubbed a “flea” as per Richard Dawkins’ pithy response to apologists writing book-length rebuttals to The God Delusion.[ii] Having read theologian Alistair McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion? (What’s with that title?!  You hold a chair at Oxford University for heaven’s sake, man.  Grow up!) and John Cornwell’s Darwin’s Angel, as well as Paula Kirby’s outstanding review of four of the Christian responses to The God Delusion, “Fleabytes”,[iii] it appears that Williams’ effort falls into exactly the same trap as the others in that it focuses so hard on trying to discredit the Four Horsemen that it neglects to defend and/or promote Christianity at all.

As with I Wish I Could Believe In Meaning, there is not a single argument/ sentence/ word/ syllable in support of God and Jesus!  As with his previous book, Williams takes it all for granted and sets about attacking straw man versions of his opponents.  The result is unlikely to change the minds of anyone who has sided with the Dawkins & Co. and might well put off those whose belief in Christianity is wavering towards the New Atheism.

Boxing match commentary

Williams opens with a blow-by-blow account of the criticisms of the New Atheist writers from Christians and other atheists.  He throws in a barrage of negative reviews, disparaging quotes, ad-hominem insults and mixes it up with criticisms from other atheists, in-group squabbles, finishing off with Sam Harris’ speech at the AAI Conference 2007 where Harris argued that perhaps the atheist label was doing us few favours.[iv]

So atheists disagree with each other’s ideas.  So what?  This is what we mean by the phrase “herding cats”.  At least our disagreements are confined to the written page and the debater’s lectern.  We’re not blowing up each other’s churches and mosques or flying planes into buildings.

Wet lettuce philosophising

Williams’ arguments for the existence of God are mainly limited to the philosophical musings of Aquinas, Anselm and Plantinga.  He rates the post-Anselm Ontological Arguments very highly; a truly ominous sign.

The Ontological Argument is little more than a footnote on philosophy courses; a brave attempt of historical interest only.  Even many theologians admit that the arguments for God’s existence are not to be seen as hard and fast proofs: they are justifications if you already believe. They are totally circular and self-refuting and amount to verbal and logical sleights of hand; an attempt to argue something into existence for which you have no physical proof.  As Kant argued in Critique of Pure Reason, you cannot prove anything (other than an abstraction) by use of sheer logic.

In his debate with Christopher Hitchens, Rabbi David Wolpe tellingly admitted that he taught theology at seminary for years and would run through all the arguments for God’s existence in lectures.  Not once in all that time did a student come up to him after the lecture and say, “Rabbi, I was a hardened atheist before I came into this class, but now thanks to you, I believe!”[v]

This was perfect example of how differently we approach the matter.  Williams argues from inside the theological “bubble” in accepting the initial premise and the conclusion before anything else and then proceeds to make mere assertions in support of his arguments.  I on other hand operate very much outside the theological bubble, which bursts all too easily when any outside evidence is introduced.

Final confirmation the scale of the problem came during Williams’ opening address in our debate when he flashed up a PowerPoint slide showing C S Lewis’ “Lunatic, Liar, or Lord?” conundrum in flowchart(!) form.  (Naturally, a quick dose of theistic logic conclusive proved Option Three to be true!)  My approach to the problem is questioning Jesus’ very existence as a real person, never mind his claims to divinity.

Williams’ refutation of Dawkins’ arguments about religious experiences being explained as hallucinations and tricks of the mind is laughable.  Firstly, Williams accuses Dawkins of not properly defining a religious experience before going onto quote Dawkins’ very definition (“a ghost or an angel or a Virgin Mary”) and then goes onto to assert that just because some religious experiences are hallucinations, doesn’t automatically mean that they all are.[vi]

Right, so it’s just Christian religious experiences that are genuine and all visions of Allah and Krishna must be filed in the drawer labelled “mind-torched whack-job”?

But as I set out below, the question of whether the philosophical arguments for God’s existence actually succeed is not even half of the argument.

Other people’s opinions

As with Williams’ previous book, A Sceptic’s Guide to Atheism is stuffed full of quotes from roughly ten writers a piece representing each side of the debate.  Whilst not quite as bad as I Wish Could Believe In Meaning, the footnote count of the end of each chapter is often over one hundred.  The book is crammed with quotes from others that if we did a word-count of the text, Williams’ own words could well be in the minority!

Williams simply doesn’t give himself enough breathing space to let his own views show, as though he is afraid to express them properly.  Instead of explaining the flaws in the atheists’ arguments, he simply quotes other writers who have criticised them and even then, we don’t get a flavour of what the rebuttals actually are, we just get ad-hominems from Keith Ward and Alvin Plantinga saying that if Dawkins’ book was handed in by a first year university student it would receive an “F” blah, blah, blah.  A little elaboration would go a long way.

Indeed, it is not even clear whether Williams has actually read some of the books himself.  He cites other writers who have replied to the American physicist Victor Stenger’s God, The Failed Hypothesis yet he never discusses Stenger’s book himself, much less explores the objections to it.  It’s as though he hasn’t bothered to read and understand the books for himself; it is sufficient if someone else he knows about has criticised the book and the matter can be left there.

This wholly inadequate style of arguing came to the fore in our live debate.  I used David Hume’s essay, “Of Miracles” from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in my opening address to discredit the eye-witness accounts of Christ’s miracles.  I set a direct challenge for Williams to refute Hume’s reasoning, stating that apologists have spent the following 250 years unsuccessfully trying to worm their way out it.

After all, if David Hume’s treatment of miracles is as fallacious as you have contend in this book, Peter, then you should have no problem knocking it over in less than thirty seconds, should you?  But no, as with his latest book, Williams simply regurgitated a line from Hume’s Abject Failure by John Earman about how terrible Hume’s argument is, and then utterly failed to explain exactly what is so terrible about it.[vii]

Not good enough.  Doesn’t even get out of the starting blocks.

Avoiding the real issues

Williams’ contribution is fatally flawed along with the other “flea” books by self-proclaimed “scholars”, because it only addresses barely a quarter of the arguments of the Four Horsemen, namely whether or not God exists, without saying a word in defence of the effects of organised religion on the world.

Unfortunately, religion is not just about the sophisticated ponderings of scholars in ivory towers debating the finer points of the Trinity.  It has an effect on every single one of us, whether we like it or not.

I could concede every single word of Alvin Plantinga and say that there are good reasons to believe in God and Christianity and Christians are perfectly justified in doing so.  Hell, I could even go the whole nine yards and say that I actually do believe in God! That I think that the virgin birth and the resurrection are as true as Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Hitler carrying out the Holocaust and Armstrong landing on the moon!

That still does not in any sense allow Christians to force their beliefs on others.  I cannot deny the existence of Joseph Stalin and Kim Jung Il, but at least I am not forced to obey them.  Even if the Christian doctrine was true, even if the evidence for it was much better, what right would that give Christians to force their beliefs on others?  Exactly the same right as liberals, conservatives and fascists: none whatsoever.

Although the theologians are called to defend religion at the debater’s lectern, ironically, they are not the people with whom I have my main quarrel.  If the theologians ran religion, it would be a far more benign entity and one that perhaps I could live with happily.  It’s not so much belief in ancient myths and fairy tales that angers me; it is the severely negative consequences that these unfounded beliefs have on the world.

If someone wants to believe in the Bible and live according to the teaching of Christianity I can’t stop that.  If they want to encourage other people to share in these beliefs, then I suppose I can’t stop that either.   What I do resent is the effects such unfounded beliefs have and their utter lack of negotiability.  If stopping the effects of religion means cutting it off at the roots and spoiling believers’ blissful ignorance and indulgence in ancient fairytales, then so be it.

Like all theology and religious philosophising, Williams’ new book is all theory and precious little practice.  Accordingly, there is nothing about the foul rantings of Falwell and Robertson, the teaching of junk-science in schools classrooms, the destruction of the Twin Towers, the abuse of children by hell-fire preaching clergymen and the discouraging of condom use by the Catholic Church in sub-Saharan African where c. 3 million people die of HIV/AIDS each year.

The simple fact is that Williams’ subtle brand of nuanced religion has very little impact on the way that religion is actually practised.  Alistair McGrath got his feathers all ruffled in response to Dawkins and bleated on (at probably more speaking engagements than he was invited to in his career preceding publication of The God Delusion) about the importance of challenging those who take an overly literalist approach to the scriptures.

Yet when, in July 2007, the Bishop of Carlisle informed us all that the floods in Northern Yorkshire were divine retribution for laws permitting homosexual marriage[viii] did McGrath say a word in public to admonish the Right Reverend Graham Dow for his unsophisticated take on matters?  Like hell he did!

A conflict with science?

Nowhere does Williams’ evasive style show more than in his treatment of the conflict between science and religion.  You’ve guessed it!  He throws in a lot of quotes from theologians asserting that there is no conflict between the two disciplines but offers absolutely no arguments or evidence in support.

There’s no discussion about attempts by the religious lobby to block potentially life-saving stem cell research or attempts to teach junk-science and creationism to school children.   There’s not even a hint of science’s capacity to determine the authenticity of religious relics such as the Shroud of Turin.

Unforgivably, Williams plays down the trial of Galileo by the Inquisition, quoting others who reckon his incarceration was not due so much to his heretic discoveries in relation to planetary movements, but due to personal animosities with Church leaders themselves.   Perhaps our intrepid apologist should re-familiarise himself with Augustine:

There is another form temptation, even more fraught with danger.  This is the disease of curiosity.  It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.

There’s not even a moment’s consideration given to the possibility that the origins of our cosmos and life on Earth is as much gap in our scientific knowledge today as the causes of disease was in Leonardo Da Vinci’s time.  No, instead Williams piles quote-upon-quote regarding the high improbability of the first single-celled life form arising on Earth.

Thankfully, there are scientists who are not prepared to give up in the face of uncertainty, but are prepared to battle on in the face of the odds.  These scientists may not pen New York Times bestsellers, but they are hard at work in laboratories, toiling away in obscurity and their work is responsible for the kind of life-saving discoveries that you and I depend on to live.

There’s less talk of Intelligent Design than Williams’ previous effort and the book is all the better for it.  Unsurprisingly, Williams omits to mention Darwin’s Black Box author and “Design Theorist” Michael Behe’s public humiliation at the hands of plaintiff counsel, Eric Rothschild, in the Kitzmiller –v- Dover P A case.

Nevertheless, Williams won’t leave Darwin alone without lobbing a few pebbles.  He cites the infamous statement pimped by the Discovery Institute that 300-plus scientists have signed as evidence of a growing opposition to Darwinism:

We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.  Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.[ix]

However, American physicist, Victor Stenger, puts a somewhat different spin on matters:

Note that “intelligent design” does not appear in the statement.  In fact, it is rather a mild expression of scepticism, always a reasonable scientific attitude, and a gratuitous call for careful examination of the evidence of Darwin’s theory – unnecessary because this has been the rule in evolution science since Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle.  Indeed, Darwin’s work still serves as an exemplar of the best in empirical and theoretical science, and is one of the most strenuously tested.[x]

A bit of Monty Python-esque evasion

Perhaps it is too sweeping to say that Williams did not tackle the question of whether the preaching of hell to children constitutes child abuse.  He does at least address the question of preaching hell to children, stating that children ought to be told compassionately that there is a very nasty place, a flip-side to heaven, that they will go as punishment for rejecting JC as their personal saviour, but this should be done as a deterrent from the risk harm; rather like warning them of electrocution if they put their fingers into a plug socket.[xi] Right.

Nevertheless, in our debate, during the audience Q & A, Williams floundered saying that Christians have long debated what hell really is and there is no clear consensus among the scholars etc. etc.  I now sympathise with Christopher Hitchens when he says that it’s next to impossible to get a straight answer out of believers as to what they really believe.

Why don’t believers just come clean and tell me that as an atheist who refuses to recognise the public torture, execution, and resurrection of a person that took place 2,000 years before I was born, on the other side of the world (and a particularly backward and barbaric part of the world at that), which I didn’t ask for, and would have tried to prevent had I known anything about, I am going to roast for eternity in Satan’s boiler-house along with all the other miserable sinners weeping and gnashing their teeth?

And finally… a half-hearted defence of the historical Jesus

The closest Williams comes to defending the actual truth of the Christian doctrine comes at the end with an appendix setting out the historical evidence for the life of Jesus Christ.

Yet again he throws in a quote from Dawkins’ section from The God Delusion about the historical unreliability of the Gospels and then counters it with a far more positive statement from Human Genome Project leader and born-again Christian, Francis Collins, and thinks this is an effective response![xii]

However, Williams never deals with the substance of Dawkins’ objections to the Gospels: the scant biographical details of Jesus in the epistles of Paul, the internal contradictions between the Gospels in just about every detail of Jesus’ life, the historical impossibility of Luke’s attempt to triangulate the story with the true historical context of First Century Palestine under the Romans, the ludicrous fabrication of an empire-wide census that required the population to return to the home town of distant ancestors, the blatant ripping off of just about all of the supernatural elements of the story from other religions in existence in the Mediterranean and Near-East region at the time.[xiii]

In my opening address in our debate, I raised many of these objections and yet again, Williams did not substantively reply to them; he just threw in more quotes from other writers.

In his book Williams waxes lyrical about the number of original New Testament documents that exist compared to recordings of other historical events and the writing of Greek philosophers.[xiv] This is little more than an argument based on strength of sales.  Is anyone going to argue that Dan Brown’s work is more truthful and more intelligent than Aristotle’s simply because he has sold more copies?

Williams also uses questionable extra-biblical sources in support of the Jesus myth, citing Thallus, Piny the Younger, Tacitus and Lucian of Samosata.[xv] True to form, Williams does not elaborate further on exactly how these accounts support the New Testament; he just expects the reader to go to the experts.

In fact, these accounts were written long after the “events” by writers born long after the “events”, are mainly limited to describing early Christian practices and are mainly based on the New Testament accounts themselves.

Thallus never wrote a word about Jesus; Lucian of Samosata wrote a satire, not anything remotely historical; Tacitus does not even mention the name “Jesus” and his reference to “Christus” means he almost certainly received his information from Christians, or Pliny the Younger, who in turn came by it from Christians he had tortured.

But in the end, this section does not even come close to a defence of the faith, let alone a promotion of it.   There is not a word, for example, on the questionable morality of vicarious atonement for sin by human sacrifice or even a reason as to why the Bible might be more valid than the Koran.

In conclusion

This one is worth an extra half star for not being quite as deliberately dishonest as I Wish I Could Believe In Meaning, but that hardly ranks as a compliment, much less a recommendation.

Indeed, based on these two works, and my debate against him, Williams perfectly befits the description he so eagerly applies to Richard Dawkins: an emperor who is looking rather scantily clad.

2 stars out of 5

Books cited or recommended

Cornwell, J. (2008). Darwin’s Angel: An Angel Riposte to The God Delusion. London: Profile Books.

Dawkins, R. (2007). The God Delusion. London: Transworld Publishers.

Hume, D. (2007). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McGrath, A E with McGrath, J C. (2007). The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Stenger, V J. (2008). God, The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. New York: Prometheus Books.

Williams, P S. (2009). A Sceptics Guide to Atheism: God Is Not Dead! Carlisle, Yorkshire: Paternoster.

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[i] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sceptics-Guide-Atheism-God-Dead/dp/1842276174.

[ii] “Fleas”, RichardDawkins.net: http://richarddawkins.net/fleas.

[iii] Paula Kirby, “Fleabytes: A review of 4 books written in response to The God Delusion”, RichardDawkins.net, 19 February 2008: http://richarddawkins.net/article,2285,Fleabytes,Paula-Kirby.

[iv] Sam Harris, “The Problem with Atheism”, Atheist Alliance International 2007, Richard Dawkins.net: 25 October 2007: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1805,Sam-Harris-at-AAI-07,RichardDawkinsnet.

[v] Christopher Hitchens –v- Rabbi David Wolpe, “Is religion Good for the world?”, RichardDawkins.net, 5 November 2008: http://richarddawkins.net/article,3304,Hitchens-Debates-Rabbi-Wolpe-on-God,NY-Times.

[vi] Williams (2009) 177 – 178.

[vii] Williams (2009) 231.

[viii] Jonathan Wynne-Jones, “Floods are judgment on society, say bishops” The Daily Telegraph, 2 July 2007:   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1556131/Floods-are-judgment-on-society-say-bishops.html.

Thomas Sutcliffe, “When is a bishop like a suicide bomber?”, The Independent, 3 July 2007: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/thomas-sutcliffe/thomas-sutcliffe-when-is-a-bishop-like-a-suicide-bomber-455675.html.

[ix] “Doubts Over Evolution Mount With Over 300 Scientists Expressing Skepticism With Central Tenet of Darwin’s Theory”, Discovery Institute, April 1, 2004:  http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2114.

[x] Stenger (2008) 61.

[xi] Williams (2009) 77.

[xii] Williams (2009) 217 – 218.

[xiii] Dawkins (2007) 117 – 123.

[xiv] Williams (2009) 219 – 220.

[xv] Williams (2009) 228.

Special thanks to Steven Carr: http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/.

All web-based resources retrieved 1 March 2009.

Peter S Williams Up Close – Part I

http://www.arn.org/authors/williams.html

http://idpluspeterswilliams.blogspot.com/

manicstreetpreacher reviews I Wish I Could Believe In Meaning by Christian apologist, Peter S Williams, following their live debate at Liverpool University on 19 February 2009.

On 19 February 2009 I spoke in a live debate at Liverpool University against Peter S Williams of Southampton-based Christian group, Damaris, opposing the motion “Does the Christian God Exist?” The YouTube links will follow.

In preparation for the debate, I read many of Williams’ articles, listened to his debates and podcasts and read his two most recent books, I Wish I Could Believe In Meaning: A Response to Nihilism and A Sceptic’s Guide To Atheism: God Is Not Dead! The latter was not officially released until 27 February, over a week after our debate, but Mr Williams in all his good Christian nature emailed me the final proof in PDF a few days beforehand.

Unlike my earlier piece on my Premier Christian Radio debates against Andy Bannister, this essay is not intended as a “what I wish I’d said at the time”. Indeed, I am very happy with my performance against Williams. Of course there are a few things I would change if we were going to do it again, one or two places were I stumbled over my words, points I would like to have discussed more thoroughly if time had allowed, but for my first live debate I was more than happy with the way I acquitted myself.

These two essays are to expand on points which were raised in the debate and to provide a fuller analysis of my opponent’s written work.

I Wish I Could Believe In Meaning: A Response to Nihilism[i]

In which my antagonist sets out his reasons as to why the atheism of Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett and Charles Darwin is deeply unsatisfying and that belief in God alone can provide meaning and purpose in people’s lives.

Except in relation to the latter he doesn’t.  He quite simply does not.

There is not one argument, not one sentence, not one word, not one single syllable in support of Williams’ proposition that only belief in God in general and the Christian God in particular is either truthful, useful or meaningful.  Perhaps because he knows he is preaching to his own choir, he takes it as read that his audience will have accepted the first premise and attempts to demonstrate that atheism is meaningless and with content.

The book is argued entirely negative terms: because the atheist world view provides no hope, no meaning and no purpose to life, it should be rejected in favour of theism.   Alas, Williams offers no positive arguments is favour of theism, but simply attempts to show how unattractive he finds atheistic materialism.

The only justification Williams gives is a personal anecdote about when a women he spoke to at the launch party of his first book, The Case For God, said that she wished she could believe in God as her life might have some purpose and meaning.  “Why don’t you?” was Williams’ reply to this poor lost little soul.  What I want to know is “Why should I?”

Apologists seem to require reminding of this ad nauseum (not that it ever sinks in) that an argument for usefulness is in no way, shape or form an argument for truth.  I’m sure the belief that Elvis will return from the dead/ alien captivity provides boundless hope and meaning to certain members of our society, but that is hardly going to persuade a rational sceptic of the truth of this proposition.   As I read the book, I was increasingly convinced that “I Wish I Could Believe in Wishful Thinking” would have been a far more appropriate title.

Beauty

The one (count it) interesting passage that had me thinking was Williams’ discussion of beauty: is it subjective or objective?  Would the Mona Lisa still be beautiful if there were no human beings left on Earth to appreciate her?

Williams’ answer is that beauty must be objective since God is the final arbiter of such matters.  However, Williams comes up short, merely asserting that David Hume’s subjective view of beauty that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison” means that sadomasochism might be beautiful to some people but personally, Williams doesn’t like that sort of thing very much.[ii]

My own view is that beauty is a manmade construct; an opinion, an emotive response, nothing more.  If there was no-one left alive to appreciate a 24-carat diamond, then it would just exist as a piece of matter.  And if I’m wrong and there is a God, how can we possibly know his mind?  For all Williams knows, God may despise the roof of the Sistine Chapel, but on the other hand, think “A dead cow cut in half submerged in a tank?  An unmade bed sodden with beer cans and used condoms?  Now that’s art!”

Morals

Williams argues that objective morality can only come from God.  God exists and he has the final say on matters of right and wrong.

Williams quotes J L Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism to suggest that even some atheists reject the idea that morality can be objective as this would provide evidence in support of the existence of God.[iii] (I must say that I read Mackie somewhat differently, but this is nothing compared to the abject quote-mining that litters the entire book, more of which later.)  Williams also quotes agnostic philosopher Michael Ruse who argues that morals are a product of human evolution and therefore can only be subjective.[iv]

Williams makes assertions which sound great on paper but fall apart when given a small injection of reality. As I said in our debate, if there is an objective moral standard, if that objective moral standard is God and if the practice of slavery is objectively wrong, then why would God expressly and repeatedly mandate, regulate and justify it in the one book he thought was so important he dictated himself?[v]

When it comes to morality, I make an exception to my otherwise materialistic world-view.  De facto morals are relative and subjective.  There are practices in other parts of the world and practices of yesterday which we in Britain today quite rightly find abhorrent.  However, I believe that there is an objective standard of morality which can only be realised through human conversation, philosophical debate and scientific research.  Those who argue that objective morality can only be achieved through God still have all their work ahead of them.

The moral wrong of slavery is just as applicable to the people of first century Palestine while Paul was recommending the practice as it was in the nineteenth century whilst Abraham Lincoln and William Wilberforce were opposing it.  Just as the existence of Australia was just as applicable to white Europeans before the continent was discovered by James Cook in the 18^th century.

Of course I am really indulging in a meta-physical fiction – a spot of decidedly unatheistic wishful thinking – since as with beauty, there would be no morality if every member of the human race was dead.  Furthermore, this objective standard will in all likelihood never be achieved, unless human progress reaches some sort of utopian endpoint where suffering and pain no longer exist.

Nevertheless, in the same way that geographical, physical and empirical facts such as the existence of Australia will only be discovered through human exploration, moral facts such as the evil of slavery can only be discovered by a similar process of research, debate and exchange of ideas.

No matter how much like chasing a rainbow this approach might seem, the alternative does not bear thinking about: saying that the actions of the 9/11 hijackers could never be said to be truly wrong, or worse; engaging in the kind of sloppy moral equivalence of the American Left in response to those attacks.  We must be able to condemn the atrocities carried out by Islamo-fascists as wrong, full-stop.  No ifs, no buts, no sickly relativistic maybes.

So why would an atheist justify an altruistic act or condemn an evil one?  Quite simply an atheist does not need to refer his or her problems upwards.  We view them for what they are and for their own sake.  There is fulfilment in performing a good deed for its own sake, as opposed to doing it because an invisible Big Brother in sky wants you to do it.   If we were endangered we would hope someone else would do the same thing for us.

Similarly, an atheist can easily abhor pain and suffering for its own sake.  We object to the Holocaust because we would not like the same thing to happen to us.  If we saw it happening in front of our eyes we would act to stop it.  Or if we witnessed the aftermath, we would try to alleviate its effects.

When the Asian tsunami struck on Boxing Day in 2004, it was exactly these kinds of sentiments that took people of all faiths and none at all to the other side of the world to help ease the suffering of perfect strangers.

It’s amazing how far human solidity will get you and equally amazing how permission from the divine is unnecessary.

A humanist is, after all, someone who can be good when no-one is watching.

As a final point, if theists want to claim the one version of religious faith, they have to accept the other.  Sure, there are many good deeds carried out in the name of religious faith, but there are also many atrocities that flow directly from it as well, and those don’t equalise at the margins as much as Williams would wish.  Is there any wickedness, any evil, any atrocity that is denied to people who think they have God on their side?

Was it or was it not the American apologist, William Lane Craig, who stood at the very same lectern at Liverpool University as I did in March 2007 and rather obnoxiously argued that an atheist cannot say that torturing a child for fun is wrong?[vi]

Well, let’s just consider the flip side to that particular coin for a moment?  We all have access to news outlets.  Isn’t it so often the case that someone who will torture a child, maybe not for fun, but certainly because they believe they are objectively moral in so doing, will do it precisely because they think they have permission from God?

The smug assertion, trotted out so regularly by believers that an atheist cannot say that the God-ordered atrocities of the Old Testament were objectively wrong, falls down like a house of cards – like all religious reasoning – once matters are thought through a little more carefully.

Limited sources quoted to death

This might seem like a trivially aesthetic point, however, it is an important point against Williams’ writing style.  The book relies so heavily on quotes from other sources that it’s almost as if Williams doesn’t really understand the arguments he is writing about, but is, but is just regurgitating the writings of his opponents and then countering them with those of his supporters.

That Williams is playing with the ideas of only about twenty different writers doesn’t help matters either.  In the theist corner we have G K Chesterton, C S Lewis, Keith Ward, Michael Behe, William Dembski and William Lane Craig.   In the atheist corner we have Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Charles Darwin, David Hume, J L Mackie and Michael Ruse.  That’s not an exhaustive list, but there aren’t too many others.  And Williams pads out the book with so many quotes from these writers that it’s impossible to know what Williams’ own views really are.  I suspect Williams doesn’t know either.

In between the introduction and the concluding chapters, the footnote count is close to or exceeds one hundred references and some of the longer chapters have over two hundred!  The chapters just grind on like a machine stuck in first gear until they fizzle out completely.

The book wheezes under the weight of third party material that there is absolutely no flow to Williams’ arguments; no beginning, no middle, no end.

Unintelligent Design

Williams discredits himself badly with his abject support for “Design Theorists” Michael Behe, William Dembski and the other wedge-driving hacks at the ironically named Discovery Institute.

Williams argues that Intelligent Design (ID) is only concerned with detecting design in nature and not will the identity of the designer him/her/itself.  Yeah right, Peter, who do you think you’re trying to kid?  Admit it, ok.  The designer is God!  If not, then perhaps you would like to share with us other fledging scientific theories you are giving such passionate support to?

Anyone who has read Richard Dawkins’ treatment of Behe and ID in The God Delusion will read these passages with a withering sense of incredulity.[vii] I’m not a biologist, but without going into the finer points of information and the order in which proteins are arranged in a cell, I can see the fallacy in the ID argument a mile off.  It is little more than a dressed up “God of the Gaps” argument: “I can’t explain how this works.  Therefore it must be God.”

We have two theories: Theory A, evolution by Natural Selection, which has plenty of evidence to back it up.  Theory B, an invisible intelligent designer, has no evidence.  Here’s a scenario that Theory A seemingly can’t explain.  Therefore, Theory A falls down like a house of cards and Theory B is the right answer by default.

It’s an incredibly bad piece of reasoning which gets you nowhere.  It’s not all that long ago that people thought that disease and bad weather was God’s punishment for sin.  These days, the number of people who rely solely on good behaviour and prayer over modern medicine to fight the elements is mercifully small.

And just who is this Intelligent Designer?  Do you have his business card?  For one thing, I’d really love to have a stern word with him over the fantastic “design” job he did on my hairline!

Humans are not the end product of evolution.  We are not the products of an intelligent agent. The proof is in our own bodies.  The reason why humans often suffer terrible back pain is because our spines are supporting 70% of our body weight on its own.  Our spines are better suited to a species which should be still walking around on all fours.  The fact that the human oesophagus shares the roles of swallowing and breathing means that humans are very susceptible to choking to death every time they eat.  Some design, I would say.

It’s not just argument from the inadequacy of the designer as Williams so desperately contends.[viii] To accept that biological organisms were intelligently designed, you have to accept that the designer must have either been stupefying inept or incredibly callous and capricious and cruel.

Williams attempts to paint ID as a serious scientific argument that is gradually gaining credibility in the scientific community when in reality ID is a political ploy, an attempt to get creationism into school science classrooms by the back door.  Williams cites respectable scientific journals which have purportedly published peer-reviewed articles advocating ID.[ix]

In fact, the history of peer-reviewed articles advocating ID is sparse to say the least!   The amount of publish material advocating ID is outweighed by a week’s worth on Darwinian evolution.[x]

For all those non-scientists like me who would like to know more, the TalkOrigins website skilfully and concisely refutes every single one of the claims of ID, and for that matter, creationism.[xi]

If you are looking for a very amusing field test of Williams’ views on ID, I can do not better than suggest a listen to his Premier Christian Radio debate against Peter Hearty, a member of the UK National Secular Society and a scientist who actually knows what he’s talking about.  Hearty demolishes every single one of Williams’ assertions without a second thought![xii]

More amusing still is the extraordinary disclaimer that now appears on the Department of Biochemical Sciences website at Lehigh University:

The faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function.  This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas.  It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years.  The sole dissenter from this position, Prof Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of “intelligent design.”  While we respect Prof Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department.  It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.[xiii]

Then again, Behe destroyed his own reputation in the Kitzmiller –v- Dover P A trial when he admitted under cross-examination that ID could only be construed as a theory only in a very loose sense, placing it in the same category as astrology!   For a summary of Kitzmiller, I recommend the excellent documentary, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.[xiv]

I think now, ID has all the credibility of the theory that the movements of the planets dictate our lives.

Quote-mining

Maybe I’m guilty of idolatry in relation to certain atheist writers, but as I read the quotes which peppered I Wish I Could Believe In Meaning and the way which Williams was attempting to use their own words against them, I thought, “That doesn’t sound like the Richard Dawkins/Dan Dennett/Charles Darwin I know!”

I sourced the quotes from their original texts myself and exactly as I suspected, Williams is engaging in that disgraceful, dirty and dishonest tactic known as “quote-mining”.  He takes certain quotes wholly out of context to make it appear that either the authors doubt their own views or they have a faith-based commitment to Darwinian evolution as a means of justifying their non-belief in God.

For the debate, I created a whole list of examples of this disgraceful tactic by my opponent.  On the night, I had no cause to use them, but I present two examples here to give an impression of what I mean.

1. Williams quoting Richard Dawkins:

Even if there were no actual evidence in favour of Darwinian theory we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.[xv]

The full passage from The Blind Watchmaker is as follows:

Instead of examining the evidence for and against rival theories, I shall adopt more of an armchair approach.  My argument will be that Darwinism is the only known theory capable of explaining certain aspects of life.  If I am right it means that, even if there were no actual evidence in favour of Darwinian theory (there is of course) we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.

One way to dramatise this point is to make a prediction.  I predict that, if a form of life is ever discovered in another part of the universe, however outlandish and weirdly alien that form of life may be in detail, it will resemble life on Earth in one key respect: it will have evolved by some form of Darwinian natural selection.   Unfortunately, this is a prediction that we shall, in all probability, not be able to test in our lifetimes, but it remains a way of dramatising an important truth about life in own planet.

The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life.  No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.  I shall demonstrate this by discussing all rival theories, not the evidence for or against them, but their adequacy, in principle, as explanation for life.[xvi]

2. Williams quoting Daniel Dennett:

I have learned from my own embarrassing experience that how easy it is to concoct remarkably persuasive Darwinian explanations that evaporate on closer inspection.[xvii]

The full passage from Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is as follows:

The ideas expressed in this book are just the beginning.  This has been an introduction to Darwinian thinking, sacrificing details again and again to provide a better appreciation of the overall shape of Darwin’s idea.  But as Miles van der Rohe said, God is in the details.  I urge caution alongside the enthusiasm I have hope I have just kindled in you.  I have learned from my own embarrassing experience that how easy it is to concoct remarkably persuasive Darwinian explanations that evaporate on closer inspection.  The truly dangerous aspect of Darwin’s idea is its seductiveness.  Second-rate versions of the fundamental ideas continue to bedevil us, so we must keep a close watch, correcting each other as we go.  The only way of avoiding the mistakes is to learn from the mistakes we have already made.[xviii]

In another place Williams quotes from the sixth edition of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species by splicing two lines together from different pages of the book![xix] The first part of Williams’ quote actually comes further along by some 20 pages in Darwin’s book on than the second part![xx]

Finally, Williams mines H Allen Orr’s damning review of Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box[xxi] to make it appear that Orr has doubts over Darwinism.[xxii]

This disgraceful tactic should speak for itself without any further comment from me.   Right from my first experiences of debating with apologists, I am no longer surprised at such below-the-belt tactics.  I wouldn’t trust their word if one of them told me Richard Dawkins’ views on the colour of an orange.

In conclusion

I thought this was a thoroughly lacklustre effort; bloated with quotes from other sources, reaching its conclusions without offering any arguments in support, grossly misrepresenting the atheistic world-view and repeatedly stooping to the depths of misquoting famous atheistic thinkers.

An extra half star for getting me to think about the objectivity/subjectivity of beauty but otherwise the film critic, Leonard Maltin, would rank this one as a “BOMB”.

1.5 stars out of 5

Books cited or recommended

Dawkins, R. (2007). The God Delusion. London: Transworld Publishers.

Dawkins, R. (2007). The Blind Watchmaker. London: Penguin.

Dennett, D C. (2006). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. London: Penguin.

Mackie, J L (1990). The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, P S. (2004). I Wish I Could Believe In Meaning: A Response to Nihilism. Southampton: Damaris Publishing.

---

[i] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wish-Could-Believe-Meaning-Response/dp/190475306X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235499072&sr=1-1.

[ii] Williams (2004) 240.

[iii] Williams (2004) 64.

[iv] Williams (2004) 121.

[v] http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/slavery.html.

[vi] William Lane Craig –v- Mike Begon debate “Is God a Delusion?” Liverpool University March 2007 http://www.bethinking.org/events/reasonable-faith.

[vii] Dawkins (2006) 156 – 161.

[viii] Williams (2004) 136 – 140.

[ix] Williams (2004) 425, 452.

[x] http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CI/CI001_4.html.

[xi] http://www.talkorigins.org/.

[xii] http://www.arn.org/docs/williams/pw_radiodebate.htm.

[xiii] http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/news/evolution.htm.

[xiv] Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial (2007) NOVA: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/.

[xv] Williams (2004) 118 – 119.

[xvi] Dawkins (2006) 287.

[xvii] Williams (2004) 430.

[xviii] Dennett (2006) 521.

[xix] Williams (2004) 418.

[xx] http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=side&itemID=F391&pageseq=1.

[xxi] H Allen Orr, “Darwin v. Intelligent Design (Again)”, Boston Review, December 1996/ January 1997: http://bostonreview.net/BR21.6/orr.html.

[xxii] Williams (2004) 431.

All web-based resources retrieved 1 March 2009.

My slot on BBC Radio Merseyside – 15/02/2009

I’ll be appearing on Wayne Clarke’s show, Daybreak, this Sunday morning, 15 February 2009 from 6am to discuss my upcoming debate with Peter S Williams at Liverpool University on 19 February 2009.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/liverpool/content/articles/2006/04/18/radiomerseyside_pres_wayneclarke_feature.shtml

Wayne is also a Baptist Minister and will be the official moderator of the live debate on the 19th.

Slot on Liverpool’s CityTalk – 10/02/2009

I recorded an interview on Liverpool City Talk’s Duncan Barkes Show plugging my debate on 19/02/2009 which can be heard at:

http://www.whatson.com/goto/?type=radio&station=citytalk&show=a_duncan_barkes___monday

There’s about 15 minutes of me talking and the rest is Duncan banging on about the banks!!!!

My Live Debate on Religion – Liverpool University – 19 Feb 2009

I’ll be speaking a live debate on Christianity at Liverpool University against Christian apologist Peter S Williams of Damaris on the motion “Does the Christian God Exist?”

The official poster is above. Full details of the time and venue are as follows:

Mountford Hall

Liverpool University Students Guild

160 Mount Pleasant

Liverpool

L3 5TR

Entry: FREE (seating is restricted, so come early to avoid disappointment)

Doors: 7:30pm

Debate starts: 8:00pm

Finish: 9:30pm

Hope you can make it!

I also have slots on CityTalk this Tuesday (10^th Feb) morning as well as BBC Radio Merseyside next weekend, so keep a listen out for those.

Read more about my antagonist at:

http://www.arn.org/authors/williams.html

http://www.damaris.org/content/content.php?type=2&id=14

http://www.bethinking.org/search/author/Peter%20S.%20Williams

http://idpluspeterswilliams.blogspot.com/

My three debates on Premier Christian Radio can be found at:

http://ondemand.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/AudioFeed.aspx

My Premier Christian Radio forum profile page is at:

http://www.premiercommunity.org.uk/profile/manicstreetpreacher

My new WordPress blog is at

https://edthemanicstreetpreacher.wordpress.com/

And I promise I will put something up there soon!

Ed “MSP” Turner

http://www.liverpoolhumanists.co.uk/

http://www.humanism.org.uk/home

http://www.secularism.org.uk/

www.richarddawkins.net

www.buildupthatwall.com

www.samharris.org

www.skepticsannotatedbible.com

www.godhatesshrimp.com