The Atheist Blogger

Well, after almost a month of inactivity on the blog, I’m back! I firstly want to apologise for not making even small posts during my absence, but I honestly had so much to do I either forgot or couldn’t get the time to write anything. I have been reading and following my favourite blogs though, so I haven’t missed any of the things that have happened recently. The reason for my absence was a large number of exams that I always try to prepare for, but tend to ignore right up until they are actually upon me. Thus for the last 3 weeks I was studying like crazy, only stopping to send the occasional message on Twitter. I think that during that period, Twitter replaced my blog almost completely, and I know that large number of my readers follow me on Twitter as well (and if you don’t yet, please follow!).

So, now that exams were over, I went to stay with my mother for the weekend, and was cut off from the internet (apart from my mobile phone’s internet) for 3 days. To top it off, when I arrived back from a 3 hour train journey yesterday, I was whisked away by my friends to a Godfather film marathon. It was the first time I’d seen any of the movies (please forgive me), and I thoroughly enjoyed them all. With the help of two bloggers and Skype friends of mine, Splendid Elles (@elles) and Andrew Milne (@footbullet), we successfully created a new religion using Twitter, based on a truly awesome British snack: JaffaCakeology. If you want to join, simply hashtag all your tweets with #JAFFACAKES, and pledge devotion to our prophet, @cmkempe.

Back to business then, and I have 4 months off doing practically nothing other than some programming and various projects. This leaves plenty of time for writing blog posts, both short and long. Today I’m going to write about a presentation I saw over the weekend. It was the start of Salisbury Festival, which is an event spanning several months in which numerous activities are run in the city where I grew up. One of the events this weekend was a talk given by Charles Foster, a lawyer who has written a book called “The Selfless Gene”. His talk was entitled “Living with God and Darwin” and promised to

[demonstrate] that orthodox Christianity is not incompatible with what evolutionary biology says about our world.

The real problem, he said,

centres around the ethical implications of natural selection, and what such a system – based on selfishness, waste and death – might say about the loving creator God of the Christian faith.

I thought such claims were interesting, so I went along to hear his argument. However the talk was not what was promised. Instead of showing how Christianity wasn’t incompatible, he simply spent his time laughing at creationist claims (along with the rest of the non-creationist audience). He talked at length about how Young Earth Creationists were foolish, how the evidence contradicts their claims, how nobody can possibly claim such things without being ignorant. This was all very well, but he didn’t cover how this was wrong in a Biblical sense, which would have actually supported his argument. I highly doubt there were any Young Earth Creationists in the audience; this is England we’re talking about! I highly doubt there were any Old Earth Creationists there either! He spent a good 20 minutes talking about creationism in it’s various forms, spending a few extra on Intelligent Design, and ending his case against creationism with a passionate argument against a “god of the gaps”.

The rest of the talk was a haphazard presentation on the evidence for evolution, and I wasn’t impressed. He didn’t go into any detail, and his slides were all extremely bad quality, as if they had been photographed from some other talk. He never mentioned the mechanisms that make evolution tick, and he kept on blaming the “neo-darwinists” and “disciples of Dawkins” on most of the confusion over evolution. Overall though, there was nothing there that could convince anyone of either position. At the beginning he told people he would make creationists in the audience “very angry”, and atheists (well, “disciples of Dawkins”) very angry too. Neither of his prophecies held true.

At the end of the talk, an atheist at the back stood up and asked him to give the evidence for God, since his talk was about showing how God was compatible with Darwin. Mr Foster explained that the way he saw it, the lack of explanation for civilisation and morality is an indicator that a God exists. In other words, because science cannot explain everything about us, God must still have some hold. What a strange conclusion for the man to make, given his argument against a “god of the gaps” that he made clear earlier on. I started to raise my hand, but another atheist across the room from me got there first, pointing out his contradiction.

So poor Mr Foster lost out to the regular thorn in the side of theists: self contradiction. Such a pity. His book was on sale in the lobby afterwards, but there was no way I was paying £11.99 for it. I suspect it will include all the same repeated arguments against creationism, which in this country aren’t really needed. Nobody apart from the fringe churches accept creationism as a legitimate claim anymore. I further suspect that the arguments for evolution will be equally bad, thus misleading the people who read it into thinking that science knows very little about the subject.