Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Poor form BBC

The BBC news magazine has a piece on science and religion.

It firstly makes the claim that religion and science are compatible, because there are religious scientists. But this is like claiming that peadophilia and religion are compatible because there are child raping priests.

It further takes about the flagella:
"Today, supporters of the Intelligent Design movement find evidence of the power and goodness of God in the rotating tail or "flagellum" of the E. coli bacterium.
For some it is a surprise, perhaps, to learn that the clearest sign of God's intelligence is to be found in a nasty vomiting bug."

If this is the clearest sign, then, well case closed on God.

The BBC should know better than push a creationist canard like this.

"Science and religion have had the kind of close and troubled relationship you would expect between siblings or even spouses. They share not only wonder at the majesty of the world we can see, but also a desire to find out what's behind it that we can't." Really? I always thought religion had the answer for everything - "God did it". Science always asked questions, religion stops them, precisely because, if it doesn't understand something, it will claim that God did it. Rather neatly summed up here.

It finishes:

That emotional and intellectual hunger will endure longer than Professor Hawking's M-theory, and those wishing to take a truly scientific attitude may be better advised to follow the lead of the great Victorian agnostic Thomas Huxley who, in one of the last things that he wrote before he died asked "Is it not better to keep silence about matters which speech is incompetent to express; to be content with revolving in the deeps of the mind the infinite possibilities of the unknown?"


I think instead, we can go with Christopher Hitchens:

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