Natural theology is bollocks, naturally
October 6th, 2008 at 00:26
If Rage Against the Machine have taught me anything, it is that it’s moderately important to “know your enemy”, in order for you to know who you’re raging against. Which is why last week I went to the chapel, which was basically a mini-church in my uni. Stained-glass windows, candles, the works. I wasn’t there for a church service or to actively rage against it, but for a lecture on ‘natural theology’, by Alister McGrath, the former Oxford professor who wrote ‘The Dawkins Delusion‘, who now, inexplicably, is a respected professor at my university.
Now, I got used to my friends making fun of my old undergraduate university, and claiming that it’s a Mickey Mouse university, because it’s a former-polytechnic, but I’m starting to wonder if in fact the university I’m at now is more like Acme Looneyversity. Not only does it have a Chapel as one of it’s central features, but it has an entire theology department – which is at least a magnitude less-valid a subject than, say, fashion design, which my old uni was one of the leading places for.
So I decided to go along to this public lecture Alister McGrath was hosting in the Chapel, in order to challenge my opinions. I’d only be a good disciple of Dawkins, and advocate of reason and evidence, if my scientific worldview could stand up to the challenge.
As luck would have it, rather than have an epiphany and have to repent on slagging off religion a lot, it turns out that my opinions are still correct and accurate. It turns out ‘natural theology’ is bollocks. And I don’t mean that in an anti-intellectual way, and I really don’t intend to write-off an entire branch of academia, but assuming that the lecture I saw was representative of the subject at large, it really doesn’t seem like it should be allowed to be something a serious place of learning should allow to go on.
Natural theology is presented as pretty much an alternative to the scientific method. The idea is that rather than us drawing conclusions about the nature of existence based on the shared experience of verifiable, observable evidence, is that you fill in the blanks yourself (usually with “God did it”) then look for something to support it. In other words, basically doing exactly what the creationists do. McGrath said that he tried to present in as theologically-neutral terms as possible, but this was undermined slightly that the lecture was being held in a fucking chapel.
Apparently taking the “Christian perspective” can help “understand” things. A couple of direct quotes from the slides were: “Capacity of nature to point to the kingdom [of God] when it is rightly interpreted” (my emphasis) and “nature has to be seen in a certain way if it is to be properly understood”… is pretty much the antithesis of what academia is all about. You’re supposed to study things first, then use what you’ve learnt to figure out what’s going on – not the other way around. I admit, things being the other way around would be useful for me though – I wouldn’t have to read some books before writing the 15,000 word dissertation I’ve got to do this year.
To give an example of the “natural theology” approach, it was presented as the bastard-child of the arts and the sciences (a bit like geography if geographers drew maps before checking them against the shape of the land). One peace of “evidence” was talking about the nature of beauty, and an excerpt from a poem about how nice some hills looked or something was shown as if to say “pretty nice hills… you’d need God or you can’t appreciate them”. No time was given to any alternative explanations for the nature of beauty, of course, such as how a human perception of beauty correlates with what someone who is healthy looks like, and that can be explained in terms of natural selection.
What was truly startling though was that once you strip away the already slim on the ground substance, you’re left with literally nothing – I honestly came away from the 90 minute lecture having felt that I learned nothing. It was all very poetic and wordy, and so on, but it was more akin to listening to some nerds who like Lord of the Rings discuss their own fan-fiction continuity ideas rather than anything more academic.
I bet it’s quite easy to do for a job though as there’s no real studying involved.
Post to: [ del.icio.us ][ Digg it ][ Furl ][ Netscape ][ Newsvine ][ reddit ][ StumbleUpon ][ Yahoo MyWeb ]Categories: Rants, Religion, Morals and Ethics, University |