JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Which is more preposterous?

That once there was nothing and then there was everything from a Great Big Explosion…

Or that a loving God created everything?”

A very poor argument indeed.

The issue to a clear mind would not be which is more preposterous, but what is the set of consequences flowing from each.

In the case of religion, it is countless centuries of murder, rape, mayhem, and pillage – all in the name either of converting the guy who has adopted the wrong view or obliterating him from existence.

The more intense the faith, the more hideous the results, as we see still in the world with all forms of orthodoxy.

By the way, the Big Bang is a fairly new theory and lots of fine scientists do not subscribe to it as it stands.

Good science tests ideas like this over and over from every possible angle, and it only says a theory has substance when it has stood up to this testing and itself predicts still other ways of testing.

Religion tests nothing: it is belief or faith in things no one can ever know, indeed things for which no test is conceivable, surely a very rational basis for society and its advance.

And, of course, the writer’s assumption of “a loving God” has no basis whatsoever.

The God of the Old Testament is the perfect image of an angry, inconsistent, murderous monster – likely a reflection of the schizophrenics, manic-depressives, and other madmen who wrote his “story.”

Were there a God, there is no more reason to assume he/she/it is loving than Native Americans had in welcoming the murderous Puritans from Europe.

The misery in our world rather predisposes any such assumption towards a malevolent being I think, although here I enter into discussion of one kind of nonsense versus another.

We ourselves, big-brained chimpanzees, are as likely to be savage as loving: often both on the same day. The image of a creator we have fashioned reflects that fact, just as the Greek myths reflected the great diversity of human failings and silliness conflated with power and heroism.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CHRISTOPHER BROOKER IN THE TELEGRAPHA rubbishy playing with words, Mr. Booker.

Science cannot be a religion.

Science – true science, not the fraudsters on the edges – is a method.

It is a scrupulously defined method for establishing not truths – there are no “truths” in modern science – but as a way of understanding the way things work.

The method could take us anywhere, and the crucial characteristic of a scientific mind is that it is that it goes where the method leads.

Preconceptions have no role.

How can a method be a religion? Religion is nothing if it is not a set of tenets taken on faith as truth.

It cannot.