Dawkins' new book

There's an extract in today's The Times - well worth reading.

Creationists, now they’re coming for your children. People who reject the theory of evolution should be placed on a level with Holocaust deniers, argues an author in his controversial new book

Thanks to Michael Roberts for pointing this out on the Christians in Science email discussion list.

atheists vs. young earth creationists

I read (skimmed) Third Way yesterday - a great magazine, by the way. There were several mentions of the 'New Atheists' (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett et al.). (Christians are not obsessed with them - they are just reacting to the fact that it is they that tend get into the news because they court controversy...)

There was a news piece about Dawkins starting an atheist youth camp (rightly pointing out that these camps are nothing new - just that Dawkins has contributed some money to supporting them, and his name of course gets picked up by the media).

And then there was the article by Frank Schaeffer "A literalist's War":

"the atheists say 'Crusades!' and the religious believer says 'Pol Pot!' Are to be stuck trading insults like schoolchildren, or is there a better way to discuss the two eternally unanswerable questions: the quest for ultimate meaning and the search for the origin of everything?"

A clue to an answer to this is two reviews later in the mag – in Caroline Berry's review of Charles Foster's book The Selfless Gene, where I gather the author of the book says 'a plague on both their houses'. Sounds like a really good book.

And then again in another review, this time by Peter Rollins of Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate by Terry Eagleton, with some fantastic quotable bits:

"Reason, Science and Faith is primarily an attack on the critique of religion as espoused by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (whom he merges as 'Ditchkins'). And yet Eagleton agrees with them in rejecting the Christianity that they find so abhorrent" ... "the expression of Christianity that Ditchkins atacks deserves all the abuse it gets, but just as Mark should not be ignored because of Stalinism so Christ should not be abandoned because of fundamentalism" ... "[Eagleton] ridicules Dennett's claim that the invention of the telescope and microscope spells the end of Christianity by pointing out that this is 'rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekov'."

Great stuff - another book I should read.

first blog

So - here it is. My very first blog. What I thought what I would do first is explain a bit about myself and explain why I am bothering to post my thoughts to the world.

I have spent most of my adult life classing myself as a “Christian”, having had a conversion experience when I was 11 years old. Hwoever, the term “Christian” means different things to different people, so perhaps I should say a little more about what that means (or what I used to mean by that term). The term “conversion experience” might anchor that a little for some. And if I was to say that I used to be a member of various Baptist churches – and that I would now class myself as “post-evangelical” – then many of you will now have a picture of who I was and what I used to believe. I guess nowadays I would now class myself as an “agnostic” for reasons that will become clear as you read further.

And what I have to say is about a lifelong interest (some might say obsession!) in the relationship between science and Christian belief. So look away now if you're not interested - and read on if you are.