There was movement at the Station..for the word had passed around...
that Prof McGrath had come from Oxford to speak.

Last night, at WAverly Anglican Church.. 2 x Phd.. molecular biology and theology.. Prof McGrath spoke very eloquently on the issue of 'science and religion'....

His primary target was of course.. Richard Dawkins material. "The God delusion", and he had a good supply of 'The Dawkins delusion' available.

The place was PACKED OUT.. overflowing.. wow..

His main approach was that science cannot prove OR disprove God... and he mentioned that there is a high powered Atheist society which put out a statement that Dawkins makes them ashamed to be called Atheists.
Looking at his extremely subjective and opinionated popularism...one can see why.

THEN...we had 'QUESTION TIME'....ohhhh no... you guessed it... all the predatorial atheists, gays, even a Jewish Rabbi leaped out of the undergrowth..and POUNCED.. aargh.. it was question time but it ended up being 'speakers corner' with the questions being 90% SPEECHES and 10% questions... still.. Alistair dealt graciously and competently with 15 layered 'speech/questions' and also the genuine ethical questions.

At the end.. 'religion' was well in tact.. Mr Dawkins appropriately sidelined :) and we all went home in the rain.

Hold the Phone [three exclamation remarks, removed by the style police]

>>His main approach was that science cannot prove OR disprove God<<

He came all the way from Oxford to tell you that?

He could have saved a ton of greenhouse gas by emailing the information.

Nobody in their right mind would assert that science can disprove the existence of anything, let alone a concept as nebulous and un-pin-downable as a God. All that science can do is deal in columns headed "Most Likely" and "Very Unlikely", especially when it comes to major issues such as the nature of the cosmos, how the universe was formed, or whether or not there exists such stuff as dark matter or Phlogiston.

No, I suspect that the reason he came was simply to promote his book, which is why he would have spent so much time bagging Dawkins. To quote from a review (by a Dale Appleby, who couldn't even spell the book title correctly) "[McGrath] makes out a polite but clear cut case against the straw-man method that Dawkins uses, and refutes the central claim of Dawkins that faith is blind and based on a 'total absence of supporting evidence'"

By the way, the book is called "Dawkins' God". But I expect he would have mentioned that. Am I right?

I know that you find it difficult to grasp, Boaz, but atheism is not a religion. What that means is that we do not share any single set of beliefs. While each separate religious organization or group tends to share - amongst itself, of course - a unified, coded set of beliefs, or faith, atheists do not.

Your own personal faith is, we know, different again, since it is the "right" one, where all these others - including vast numbers who nominate themselves as sharing "Christian" beliefs - are wrong.

So it might come as a surprise to both you and the esteemed professor, that heaping scorn on the opinions of one particular atheist, has absolutely no impact on the one standing next to him.

Or me, either.

Incidentally, Boaz, on a completely different topic:

>>There was movement at the Station..for the word had passed around...
that Prof McGrath had come from Oxford to speak.<<

Doesn't scan.

In fact, not only does it not scan, but it does not do so, in a most offensive manner. Truly ugly.

If the style police can scold me for using three consecutive exclamation marks, surely they can come down even more heavily on such an egregious offence against the nature of poetry?

"At the end.. 'religion' was well in tact.. Mr Dawkins appropriately sidelined"

And all the believers went home with a nice warm feeling. But you know as well as I that the prof proved nothing and religion is still only intact for those with sufficient faith to believe such.

And that's the way it will always be.

"His main approach was that science cannot prove OR disprove God..."

Oh duh Boazy. We've been telling you just that for yonks. That's the nature of science - you can't prove that anything doesn't exist, but you can prove that something does if you have sufficient evidence.

And yes, your mangling of a great opening line was an affront to poetic sensibility :)

Yeah, well those predatory atheists and Jews will just jump out of the undergrowth at the slightest provocation. I guess a lot of undergrowth grows in churches these days. You could have at least gotten some details correct, if only out of respect for the man, he did a PhD in molecular biophysics (not molecular biology, which is quite different) and you spelled his name incorrectly.

It's funny though, I am having trouble digging out the title of his old thesis from Oxford (the molecular biophysics one), does anyone have a link? As far as I can tell that's about the only real science that he has written about, everything else is theology (and Dawkins of course). He seems to have written an awful lot about Dawkins, I guess he owes the man a debt of gratitude, we would never had heard of ALISTER McGrath otherwise.