It takes more than one person to argue with Michael Ruse. Jerry has, Russell has, but I still found new stuff that irritates me, so here it is.

…science tells us that Adam and Eve are fictions. That Saint Paul or Uncle Tom Cobley and all thought otherwise is irrelevant. They were wrong. This is not to say that they were stupid or careless. Two thousand years ago, for a Jew to believe in Adam and Eve was perfectly sensible. But time moves on and with it our understanding of the world around us, and old beliefs have to give way to new ones. Aristotle thought that some people were born to be slaves. He was wrong.

I just accidentally learned, via a post of Eric’s, that George Pitcher last autumn got a job as public relations flack for the archbishop of Canterbury. I’m amazed. I’m shaken to my core. My Weltanschauung is all anyhow. I have to rethink everything I thought I knew.

One thing I thought I knew was that Rowan Williams is a scholarly, gentlemanly sort of fella, however mistaken about everything. But he can’t be, since he hired or consented to the hiring of a vulgar abusive hack like George Pitcher.

Remember him? Remember him in May of last year, when Evan Harris lost his seat?

A stranger to principle, Harris has coat-tailed some of the most vulnerable and

Anthony Grayling explains some things about the New College of the Humanities.

The cast of professors is stunning but will they actually spend much time on the new campus? “They won’t give tutorials, but they will be partners, bringing advice and expertise. I want to recreate the experience I had at Oxford. I was very intensively tutored in my college but could also go and hear some amazing and extraordinary lectures.”

That’s what I thought it was about. I thought that because it was one of the many things we talked about over tea a few weeks ago. We talked about the one-on-one tutorial – I from the point of view of one who had never experienced such a thing … Read the rest

On a far more intelligent note, there’s Katha Pollitt’s conversation with Wajeha al-Huwaider. 

Katha asked

Some Muslim feminists are trying to reinterpret—they would say, correctly interpret—the Koran in a gender-egalitarian way. For instance, they point out the Koran says only that women should dress modestly, not that they need to be swathed from head to toe, or even cover their hair. Do you think there can be a feminist Islam?

The answer is definite:

There is a feminist Islam, mainly led by Muslim women in the West. But they tend to forget that none of the monotheistic religions treat men and women equally, and there’s a limit to what scholarship can do to change that. For example, daughters inherit half