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Lawrence M Krauss, former
chairman of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University, USA
has become famous for being an absolutely uncompromising adversary of
creationism. Creationism is the belief that life, our planet or the universe
as a whole was created by a supreme being or by some other means of
supernatural intervention. Yet Krauss can manage to summon up the grace to
maintain that science does not make it impossible to believe in God and that
we should recognise that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous
about it.
Compare that now with the
response it generated in the rabid evolutionary atheist, Richard Dawkins,
who is often called Darwin's Rottweiler. "I am utterly fed up with the
respect that we --all of us including the secular among us -- are
brainwashed into bestowing on religion," he said. "Children are systemically
taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith,
which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from
tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that
comes from real evidence."
Never mind that the
philosopher Mary Midgley has stated that to take issue with Dawkins would be
as unnecessary as to "break a butterfly upon a wheel", we still need to know
what or where is the "real evidence" this person speaks of . Could it be the
knowledge, as Aristotle---the great patriarch of natural science -- used to
think, that Earth is the centre of the universe? Or that life could arise
spontaneously from decaying matter, as in maggots appearing in rotting meat?
Or that most stomach ulcers are caused by stress and spicy food as was
believed by the entire medical community in the world till only about 20
years ago, when actually the reason was found to be bacterial infection?
These days we're being given
further "real evidence" in as much that the fundamental constituents of
reality are strings of extremely small scale which vibrate in something like
11 spacetime dimensions to create everything in existence. If this is
evidence (and which it may well prove to be), then so is any one person's
belief that his or her actuality is manifest and brought into being through
the intercession of a higher entity (and which may, too, well prove to be).
We need to recognise that faith or science also depends on certain
assumptions about the way the world is. |
