Odd where you find things that wind you up

It was no surprise to me to receive at Christmas two copies of The Queen's English, and how to use it, a book titled in such a way that nobody could be in any doubt as to its subject matter. It's a handy guide to correct grammar, punctuation, clarity, brevity in English, you know the drill. The sort of thing I'm happy to see on bookshop shelves.
(I also strongly recommend Lynne Truss's excellent Eats, Shoots and Leaves, in a less formal but equally informative, similar vein).

Within its pages, though, offered as an example of excellent use of English, with which I have no argument, there was a passage extracted from an angry Reverend Doctor Peter Mullen's letter to the Daily Telegraph, in which he rages at the beaurocracy foisted upon him by the Church of England. In it, he says,

"I am trying to be a priest, but I haven't time. When I was first appointed vicar... the diocesan annual returns were on one side of A4. Nowadays, the annual returns are a foot thick and a bundle of perfidious obscurity, hedged about with health and safety and absurd questions about light bulbs, and serious enquiries as to what the PCC is doing to reduce our carbon footprint - all because the Church has taken up the pagan fantasy of global warming."

I suspect regular readers (Fred in Cheltenham, if I can steal from Les Dawson), will know which bit of this I have a problem with. I don't, as I've said, have any argument that it's well written, but the gall in a representative of the Church calling global warming a 'pagan fantasy' is so outrageous I haven't quite got the words to adequately describe it. Just to be clear, you think an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity created the universe and everything in it in six days (He had a rest, remember). That He sent an angel to tell a virgin that His son was coming to Earth through her, a son who performed miracles like raising the dead and rising from his own grave, and then ascended to Heaven, and will yet return. I could go on - you get the whole faith idea, no doubt.

However, the scientific reality of the slow (but accelerating) rise in global annual mean temperatures - a pattern which has been, and is being measured and tracked as a fact - and the overwhelming evidence of changing weather patterns, a retreating ice shelf, melting glaciers and everything else, that's a fantasy? Fucking hell. Perhaps my definition of faith is awry, but I had rather hoped that a religious faith would not blind people to scientific reality, still less persuade them to dismiss other people's beliefs as 'fantasy'. Pot, kettle, black.

I sincerely hope he's just enjoyed the coldest December Britain has had since records started being kept of these things, which will in no way be related to climate change, of course. I've probably said before in these pages that atheists are frequently portrayed as arrogant in their certainty. I would present Reverend Doctor Mullen's letter as evidence that this criticism can equally be levelled at the theologists.

Opening eyes

Because of the strange hours I work, I often finish a shift after the point at which it's possible to get public transport home, in which case I'm entitled to a cab. I therefore spend several late evenings, often after midnight, talking to cabbies about whatever's on their mind. I've had some extremely interesting coversations with some of these lads but, perhaps because many of the drivers are Muslims and their faith is important to them, the most frequent topic of discussion seems to be theology, or the relationship/debate between theology and science.

These discussions have, without exception, been friendly, mutually respectful and interesting, however strongly each speaker may have held their beliefs, but something I learned the other night nonetheless left me saucer-eyed with surprise. A chap driving me home had never even heard of the theory of evolution. It wasn't that he didn't believe in it, or had been taught some other theory, he had literally never heard of it. Only by talking to me did he learn that not everybody thinks that God, or Allah, or whatever you call your deity of choice, made animals and plants exactly as they are now. I had to explain how the theory works - what evolutionists think happened (and is happening, of course). He asked the same questions that everybody who doesn't subscribe to evolutionary theory thinks, though in his case he asked out of a detached interest in my beliefs rather than to try to refute them.

He asked: If Man came from apes (a simplistic explanation given the likely tangled routes of our hominid evolutionary past but the best I could do to explain it to somebody who had never even heard the theory before), what was before the apes? And what was before that? And before that? And where did it come from in the first place?

Why aren't apes still evolving into humans? (A question I've heard before, but one which so completely misses, or misunderstands, the point that it's hardy worth answering).

Why aren't we, and all other plants and animals, still evolving?

I answered as best I could but I'm not an evolutionary biologist, my grasp of divergent evolutionary theory is not sound enough to be thinking about passing it onto other people and the cab ride was only 25 minutes.

For his part, his biggest surprise was that, just as he's completely committed to his beliefs, so am I to mine, despite that fact that mine contains bits marked 'I don't know'. For him, the central beliefs by which he lives his life are utterly certain. Mine are not, and he couldn't reconcile what he saw as a contradiction between my committed atheism and belief in science, and the fact that science is full of uncertainty, indeed built upon it. There are gaps in our understanding of the origins of the universe, and of life on our planet, but I'm as committed to my beliefs as he is to his. For me the beauty of science is that it's principal position is 'we don't know'. It's still capable of new revelations, of new beauties, of changing a position you believed in completely before with some startling new piece of knowledge.

But I started this post really not to write about my bumbling efforts to explain evolutionary theory to a man interested in hearing it but absolutely 100% committed to a different belief, but about my shock at the fact that there is anybody out there, anybody at all, living in a Western culture in the modern media age, who's never even heard of it. I find this so staggering that I just had to put it down here.