How To Be An Agnostic
tests or empirical seizure alone allow. Its real value is that it lives
in life: hope beyond the evidence.
C – is for Church
When I was ordained, my bishop, David Jenkins, said that the
trouble with the church is that you can’t live with it and you
can’t live without it. I live without it more than I did. However,
for all the criticisms I have of it, particularly its joining in the
battle for certainties, it holds traditions that in my view our
world is infi nitely poorer without. Where else in our culture
can you be ashed, held, and told you are dust and going to
die? Where else can you hear otherworldly music enacted in an
equally otherworldly context, namely, ancient liturgy? Where
else can you sit next to strangers and have remembered before
you a story that strains for the divine? Sometimes it is a relief
to have the burden of being oneself lifted. Love it and hate it,
Church is the place for that.
D – is about Darwinism
Neo-Darwinism is currently the most strident form of scientism.
But need one feel in league with the creationists to question it?
There are better alternatives.
Consider the philosophical interpretation of Darwinism
offered by Karl Popper. For him, Darwinism is not a testable
scientifi c theory but what he called a ‘metaphysical research
programme’ within which many theories may be tested. One
should not get carried away with this metaphysical ascription.
He did not mean it in a theological sense, but simply to suggest
that Darwinism as a whole is not falsifi able and so not of the
best kind of theory science can offer.
In fact, in a certain way, Darwinian adaptation is tautologous.
If you imagine a fairly stable environment in which a species of
fairly similar reproducing creatures live, then the offspring of
those creatures that are better adapted to that environment are