11.02.08

Party line

Posted in you've got mail at 3:49 pm by nemo

‘Darwin? That’s just the party line’Many scientists don’t believe that science is the only religion in town.

We’re all familiar with Queen Gertrude’s dry observation in Act III of Hamlet that the Player Queen “doth protest too much.” Gertrude’s point, of course, is that the Player Queen’s over-insistence of her love for her husband makes her declarations highly suspect.
I often think of Gertrude’s line when I see how vehemently many A-list scientists and fellow-travelling literati lash out at anyone who does not embrace their insistence that no deity is behind either the creation of our universe or plant and animal origins on Earth.

For example, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, says that anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution “is ignorant, stupid or insane.” Oxford professor Peter Atkins, another ardent atheist, recently denounced theology, poetry and philosophy and concluded that “scientists are at the summit of knowledge, beacons of rationality and intellectually honest.” Geneticist Emile Zuckerkandl — writing on whether biological facts suggest an intelligent designer — terms the notion of intelligent design an “intellectual virus” and its advocates “an offensive little swarm of insects … [who] feed like leeches on irrational beliefs.”

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