Mary Midgley begins badly.

Science really isn’t connected to the rest of life half as straightforwardly as one might wish. For instance, Isaac Newton noted gladly that his theory of gravitation gave a scientific proof of God’s existence. Today’s anti-god warriors, by contrast, declare that Darwin’s evolutionary theory gives a scientific disproof of that existence and use this reasoning, quite as confidently as Newton used his, to convert the public.

No they don’t. So why should we pay any attention to the rest of what she says? If she can’t even get the first paragraph right, why trust her?

No reason, so I won’t bother discussing the rest of what she says, which is just sentimental gesturing. But it’s … Read the rest

Chuck should team up with Sholto Byrnes. Together they could make Britain a more spiritual and caring place. Chuck has told the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies that environmental problems are on account of not believing in “the soul” and that it’s Galileo’s fault and that scientists are baffling because they don’t see things his way.

“As a result, Nature has been completely objectified — ‘She’ has become an ‘it’ — and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.” The Prince said that he believed “green technology” alone could not resolve the world’s environmental problems. Instead, the West must do something about its “deep, inner crisis of the soul”.

That … Read the rest