Feeding the Hand that Bites Him - or Something

I'd like to thank Steve for his contribution to our Great Evolution Debate. As I said in my own comments, I mostly agree with him. And as normal with Steve that means I agree with his science. Although I quail at the mental picture he comjured up of naked people waving straw men.

I disagree however with his assertion that I can't attack Dr Dawkins' attack on literalism and also literalism itself. That's exactly what I can do - it being my blog. And saying that Creationists are wrong is not yet a crime - unless it is, under one of those over-arching pieces of thought-crime legislation that Tony Blair invented. In which case I'll see Steve in court - where we'll both be in the dock.

No, I have every right to criticise Dr Dawkins for his own straw men - which I presume he did not create, but rather has evolved painstakingly from straw monkeys in his lab. The idea of a Creationist in every school is a McCarthyite invention of great ingenuity. But the positions of those fundamentalists within the churches who definitely exist are also there to be attacked. It's just the fundamentalists that hold these views aren't really off running the schools. But they do poison and polarise the debate - which makes it easy for middle-brow newspapers such as the Daily Mail. For the purposes of a nice easy characterisation, on one side there are Dr Dawkins, the EU, Human Rights lawyers, comedians, Health + Safety enforcers and New Labour. In the blue corner we have England, the King James Bible, old maids cycling to the Rose and Crown after Evensong, the Common Person, Biblical literalism and the Little Baby Jesus.

It's a view that gives Dr Dawkins media time when he attacks fundies. And it makes fundies appear like they represent the norm when they present their ideas as being what Jesus said - in that strange Gospel land where Jesus, despite being wholly human with a man's limitations, also has total knowledge of science and yet is oddly quiet on the existence of America.

It all gets complicated in reality when we have more shades than that in the whole of life. In this reality we can find that not every one who is anti-Gadaffi is therefore a peace-loving democrat. But nor are they all Al Qaeda sympathisers. Not all Christians are fundamentalists. Not all vicars are either gay, or women with dodgy taste in the colour of clerical shirtings. Not all blokes with beards smoke pipes. Not all IT people wear anoraks.Not all scientists are atheists. And not all atheists are good scientists. And Dr Dawkins can write perfectly good books such as Blind Watchmaker or Greatest Show on Earth while still writing preposterous name-dropping laziness and choir-preaching like God Delusion.

So I say a plague on all your houses. This is an Oasis of Fuzzy Thinking. Because reality is fuzzy.