Allan Chapman - Slaying the dragons. Destroying myths in the history of science and faith

This book has grown out of many years of lecturing, to audiences of all kinds, on the historical relationship of science with Christianity, and the many questions and comments thrown at me in discussion, including Is there anything I can read on this? To all those who have listened, questioned, and commented, my thanks are due. I am also deeply indebted to Paul Clifford and Alison Hull of Lion Hudson for their invaluable guidance and perceptive comments, which have led me to make a great many additions and improvements to my original manuscript, resulting, I hope, in a much better book. But my biggest debt of all is to my wife Rachel, who has been ready with her typing and editorial skills, advice, criticism, and scholarship at every stage of the process, and whose patience has been truly monumental. It is to her that this book is dedicated.

For much of the twentieth century, and especially since the 1960s, the Judeo-Christian faith, and Christianity in particular, have been under increasing assault. This assault has come from several directions: from particular interpretations of scientific progress; from certain styles of radical politics, often based on social science presuppositions; from fashionable philosophers and social pundits; and, by the late 1990s, from the media. And one of the great ironies is that while Great Britain has an established church, the Christian faith has become a thing of ridicule and mockery in many circles. National Health Service Trusts have suspended nurses who would not remove crucifixes hanging around their necks, and bed-and-breakfast hotel proprietors and experienced foster parents are threatened with prosecution because they will not countenance certain practices condemned in parts of the Scriptures or permit them to be performed on their private premises (yet a blind eye is not infrequently turned to the customs and practices of non-Christian religions). Indeed, several law-abiding Christians have mentioned to me that if they should utter the word Jesus or Christ in any context other than that of a joke or a blasphemous expletive, they feel that they would be exposing themselves to accusations of being fundamentalist, narrow-minded, out-of-date, or stupid.

For do not the fashionable New Atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, the late Christopher Hitchens, et al. (so styled by present-day journalists to differentiate them from the Old Guard of atheists, such as Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley) constantly remind us that Christianity is a thing of the Dark Ages; that science and reason have swept its superstitions away, and that sociology, psychology, neurology, and most of all evolution, have delivered us from such bondage? And as our secular political leaders and promoters of multiculturalism constantly tell us, do we not now live in a free, open, equal, rational, and transparent global village society? A society so tolerant that every creed and belief must be respected and lovingly nourished as an expression of our natural goodness unless, of course, that creed comes from the Holy Bible!

This monumental double-think a double-think of Orwellian proportions constitutes one of the biggest myths of the age in which we live: a myth that derives its style of thinking from perversions of scientific thinking, in which the absolutism of Newtonian mechanics is combined with the dogmatic determinism of neo-Marxism, and the directionless moral vacuity of postmodernism.

Indeed, these myths, which form so much of the social geography of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, have become so pervasive across much of Western society that many people regard them as natural and unquestioned aspects of modern thought. I remember in my youth, in the late 1960s, being peddled stories of how the free modern world only came into being when brave souls such as Copernicus, Galileo, and the philosophers of the Enlightenment had the courage to stand up to the church and often paid dire penalties. Of how poor Charles Darwin had been vilified for daring to present the scientific fact that we all came from monkeys. But as a natural sceptic as far as intellectual fashions go, who has always had a fascination with the nature of myth-making, I became increasingly inclined to treat these socio-myths with caution. As I shall show more fully in Chapter 11, I have always felt that anti-religious scepticism, as a universally lauded instrument of analysis, must itself be regarded sceptically.