The GOD Delusion (50 page)

Incidentally,
when a curious reader wrote to Emmanuel College to ask why the lecture
had been removed from the website, he received the following
disingenuous reply from the school, again recorded by Andrew Brown:

Emmanuel
College has been at the centre of a debate regarding the teaching of
creation in schools. At a practical level Emmanuel College has had a
huge number of press calls. This has involved a considerable amount of
time for the Principal and senior Directors of the College. All of
these people have other jobs to do. In order to assist we have
temporarily removed a lecture by Stephen Layfield from our website.

Of
course, the school officials may well have been too busy to explain to
journalists their stance on teaching creationism. But why, then, remove
from their website the text of a lecture that does precisely that, and
to which they could have referred the journalists, thereby saving
themselves a great deal of time? No, they removed their head of
science's lecture because they recognized that they had something to
hide. The following paragraph is from the beginning of his lecture:

Let
us state then right from the start that we reject the notion
popularised, perhaps inadvertently, by Francis Bacon in the 17th
century that there are 'Two Books' (i.e. the Book of nature &
the Scriptures) which may be mined independently for truth. Rather, we
stand firm upon the bare proposition that God has spoken
authoritatively and inerrantly in the pages of holy Scripture. However
fragile, old-fashioned or naive this assertion may ostensibly appear,
especially to an unbelieving, TV-drunk modern culture, we can be sure
that it is as robust a foundation as it is possible to lay down and
build upon.

You
have to keep pinching yourself. You are not dreaming. This is
not some preacher in a tent in Alabama but the head of
science
at a school into which the British government is pouring
money, and which is Tony Blair's pride and joy. A devout Christian
himself, Mr Blair in 2004 performed the ceremonial opening of one of
the later additions to the Vardy fleet of schools.
¹⁴⁶
Diversity may be a virtue, but this is diversity gone mad.

Layfield
proceeds to itemize the comparison between science and scripture,
concluding, in every case where there seems to be a conflict, that
scripture is to be preferred. Noting that earth science is now included
in the national curriculum, Layfield says, 'It would seem particularly
prudent for all who deliver this aspect of the course to familiarise
themselves with the Flood geology papers of Whitcomb & Morris.'
Yes, 'Flood geology' means what you think it means. We're talking
Noah's Ark here. Noah's Ark! - when the children could be learning the
spine-tingling fact that Africa and South America were once joined, and
have drawn apart at the speed with which fingernails grow. Here's more
from Layfield (the head of science) on Noah's flood as the recent and
rapid explanation for phenomena which, according to real geological
evidence, took hundreds of millions of years to grind out:

We
must acknowledge within our grand geophysical paradigm the historicity
of a world-wide flood as outlined in Gen 6-10. If the Biblical
narrative is secure and the listed genealogies (e.g. Gen 5; 1 Chro 1;
Matt 1 8c Lu 3) are substantially full, we must reckon that this global
catastrophe took place in the relatively recent past. Its effects are
everywhere abundantly apparent. Principal evidence is found in the
fossil-laden sedimentary rocks, the extensive reserves of hydrocarbon
fuels (coal, oil and gas) and the 'legendary' accounts of just such a
great flood common to various population groups world-wide. The
feasibility of maintaining an ark full of representative creatures for
a year until the waters had sufficiently receded has been well
documented by, among others, John Woodmorrappe.

In a
way this is even worse than the utterances of know-nothings like Nigel
McQuoid or Bishop Wayne Malcolm quoted above, because
Layfield is educated in science. Here's another astonishing passage:

As
we stated at the beginning, Christians, with very good reason, reckon
the Scriptures of the Old & New Testaments a reliable guide
concerning just what we are to believe. They are not merely religious
documents. They provide us with a true account of Earth history which
we ignore at our peril.

The
implication that the scriptures provide a literal account of geological
history would make any reputable theologian wince. My friend Richard
Harries, Bishop of Oxford, and I wrote a joint letter to Tony Blair,
and we got it signed by eight bishops and nine senior scientists.
¹⁴⁷
The nine scientists included the then President of the Royal Society
(previously Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser), both the biological
and physical secretaries of the Royal Society, the Astronomer Royal
(now President of the Royal Society), the director of the Natural
History Museum, and Sir David Attenborough, perhaps the most respected
man in England. The bishops included one Roman Catholic and seven
Anglican bishops - senior religious leaders from all around England. We
received a perfunctory and inadequate reply from the Prime Minister's
office, referring to the school's good examination results and its good
report from the official schools inspection agency, OFSTED. It
apparently didn't occur to Mr Blair that, if the OFSTED inspectors give
a rave report to a school whose head of science teaches that the entire
universe began after the domestication of the dog, there just might be
something a teeny weeny bit wrong with the standards of the
inspectorate.

Perhaps
the most disturbing section of Stephen Layfield's lecture is his
concluding 'What can be done?', where he considers the tactics to be
employed by those teachers wishing to introduce fundamentalist
Christianity into the science classroom. For example, he urges science
teachers to 

note
every occasion when an evolutionary/old-earth paradigm (millions or
billions of years) is explicitly mentioned
or implied by a text-book, examination question or visitor and
courteously point out the fallibility of the statement. Wherever
possible, we must give the alternative (always better) Biblical
explanation of the same data. We shall look at a few examples from each
of Physics, Chemistry & Biology in due course.

The
rest of Layfield's lecture is nothing less than a propaganda manual, a
resource for religious teachers of biology, chemistry and physics who
wish, while remaining just inside the guidelines of the national
curriculum, to subvert evidence-based science education and replace it
with biblical scripture.

On
15 April 2006, James Naughtie, one of the BBC's most experienced
anchormen, interviewed Sir Peter Vardy on radio. The main subject of
the interview was a police investigation of allegations, denied by
Vardy, that bribes - knighthoods and peerages - had been offered by the
Blair government to rich men, in an attempt to get them to subscribe to
the city academies scheme. Naughtie also asked Vardy about the
creationism issue, and Vardy categorically denied that Emmanuel
promotes young-Earth creationism to its pupils. One of Emmanuel's
alumni, Peter French, has equally categorically stated,
¹⁴⁸
'We were taught that the earth was 6000 years old.'* Who is telling the
truth here? Well, we don't know, but Stephen Layfield's lecture lays
out his policy for teaching science pretty candidly. Has Vardy never
read Layfield's very explicit manifesto? Does he really not know what
his head of science has been up to? Peter Vardy made his money selling
used cars. Would you buy one from him? And would you, like Tony Blair,
sell him a school for 10 per cent of its price - throwing in an offer
to pay all his running costs into the bargain? Let's be charitable to
Blair and assume that he, at least, has not read the Layfield lecture.
I suppose it is too much to hope that his attention may now be drawn to
it.

* To
get an idea of the scale of this error, it is equivalent to believing
that the distance from New York to San Francisco is 700 yards.'

Headmaster
McQuoid offered a defence of what he clearly saw as his school's
open-mindedness, which is remarkable for its patronizing complacency:

the
best example I can give of what it is like here is a sixth-form
philosophy lecture I was giving. Shaquille was sitting there
and he says, 'The Koran is correct and true.' And Clare, over here,
says, 'No, the Bible is true.' So we talked about the similarities
between what they say and the places where they disagree. And we agreed
that they could not both be true. And eventually I said, 'Sorry
Shaquille, you are wrong, it is the Bible that is true.' And he said,
'Sorry Mr McQuoid, you are wrong, it is the Koran.' And they went on to
lunch and carried on discussing it there. That's what we want. We want
children to know why it is they believe what they believe and to defend
it.
¹⁴⁹

What
a charming picture! Shaquille and Clare went to lunch together,
vigorously arguing their cases and defending their incompatible
beliefs. But is it really so charming? Isn't it actually rather a
deplorable picture that Mr McQuoid has painted? Upon what, after all,
did Shaquille and Clare base their argument? What cogent evidence was
each one able to bring to bear, in their vigorous and constructive
debate? Clare and Shaquille each simply asserted that her or his holy
book was superior, and that was that. That is apparently all they said,
and that, indeed, is all you
can
say when you have
been taught that truth comes from scripture rather than from evidence.
Clare and Shaquille and their fellows were not being educated. They
were being let down by their school, and their school principal was
abusing, not their bodies, but their minds.

And
now, here's another charming picture. At Christmas-time one year my
daily newspaper, the
Independent,
was looking for
a seasonal image and found a heart-warmingly ecumenical one at a school
nativity play. The Three Wise Men were played by, as the caption
glowingly said, Shadbreet (a Sikh), Musharaff (a Muslim) and Adele (a
Christian), all aged four.

Charming?
Heart-warming? No, it is not, it is neither; it is grotesque. How could
any decent person think it right to label four-year-old children with
the cosmic and theological opinions of their parents?
To see this, imagine an identical photograph, with the caption changed
as follows: 'Shadbreet (a Keynesian), Musharaff (a Monetarist) and
Adele (a Marxist), all aged four.' Wouldn't this be a candidate for
irate letters of protest? It certainly should be. Yet, because of the
weirdly privileged status of religion, not a squeak was heard, nor is
it ever heard on any similar occasion. Just imagine the outcry if the
caption had read, 'Shadbreet (an Atheist), Musharaff (an Agnostic) and
Adele (a Secular Humanist), all aged four.' Mightn't the parents
actually be investigated to see if they were fit to bring up children?
In Britain, where we lack a constitutional separation between church
and state, atheist parents usually go with the flow and let schools
teach their children whatever religion prevails in the culture.
'The-Brights.net' (an American initiative to rebrand atheists as
'Brights' in the same way as homosexuals successfully rebranded
themselves as 'gays') is scrupulous in setting out the rules for
children to sign up: 'The decision to be a Bright must be the child's.
Any youngster who is told he or she must, or should, be a Bright can
NOT be a Bright.' Can you even begin to imagine a church or mosque
issuing such a self-denying ordinance? But shouldn't they be compelled
to do so? Incidentally, I signed up to the Brights, partly because I
was genuinely curious whether such a word could be memetically
engineered into the language. I don't know, and would like to, whether
the transmutation of 'gay' was deliberately engineered or whether it
just happened.
¹⁵⁰
The Brights campaign got off
to a shaky start when it was furiously denounced by some atheists,
petrified of being branded 'arrogant'. The Gay Pride movement,
fortunately, suffers from no such false modesty, which may be why it
succeeded.

In
an earlier chapter, I generalized the theme of 'consciousness-raising',
starting with the achievement of feminists in making us flinch when we
hear a phrase like 'men of goodwill' instead of 'people of goodwill'.
Here I want to raise consciousness in another way. I think we should
all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to
some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to
decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life and of morals.
The very sound of the phrase 'Christian child' or 'Muslim child' should
grate like fingernails on a blackboard.

Here
is a report, dated 3 September 2001, from the Irish Radio station
KPFT-FM.

Catholic
schoolgirls faced protests from Loyalists as they attempted to enter
the Holy Cross Girls' Primary School on the Ardoyne Road in north
Belfast. Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers and British Army (BA)
soldiers had to clear the protestors who were attempting to blockade
the school. Crash barriers were erected to allow the children to get
through the protest to the school. Loyalists jeered and shouted
sectarian abuse as the children, some as young as four years of age,
were escorted by the parents into the school. As children and parents
entered the front gate of the school Loyalists threw bottles and stones.

Naturally,
any decent person will wince at the ordeal of these unfortunate
schoolgirls. I am trying to encourage us to wince, too, at the very
idea of labelling them 'Catholic schoolgirls' at all. ('Loyalists', as
I pointed out in Chapter 1, is the mealy-mouthed Northern Ireland
euphemism for Protestants, just as 'Nationalists' is the euphemism for
Catholics. People who do not hesitate to brand children 'Catholics' or
'Protestants' stop short of applying those same religious labels - far
more appropriately - to adult terrorists and mobs.)