The wisdom of atheists

Speaking to Phillip Adams, Richard Dawkins says this about the Sydney Anglican Heretics: “Yes, in its most naive form you will get these Sydney Anglicans who say that the story of Genesis, that the creation took 6 days to accomplish, you simply have to read each of those days as, whatever it is, 100 million years or a thousand million years, you get the right answer. I mean that's very, very naive, of course. You are absolutely right that there is this tendency to resort to metaphor. Which maddens me because I suspect that the original authors of, for example, the book of Genesis, in no sense thought of it as a metaphor. I suggest that they thought that they were probably writing down folk-tales that had been handed down by word of mouth. But they believed them to be factually true, and the vast majority of people in history have believed them to be factually true. So I think that to reinterpret them as metaphor is a kind of evasion.”

Richard Kilty, another atheist, writing in one of the atheist journals, first asks if evolution and religion are reconcilable, complementary or both. He answers by expressing that, “We are not dealing on this amorphous level, instead we want to know about the antithesis of man in evolution and man in Christianity. And we do have an anti-thesis: Acceptance of evolution precludes the fundamentals of Christianity, to wit, Garden, Adam and Eve, Fall, Redeemer, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension. Acceptance of evolution requires the concatenation: fish-amphibians-reptiles-mammals-apeman-man with all transformations occurring naturally. This dichotomy is irreconcilable.”

Kilty goes on to ruminate with acute insight that the two are not reconcilable; that a child taught evolutionary concepts (including long ages), will have his belief in God disturbed: “How subversive is evolutionary theory to Church dogma.”

In another section of the newsletter one writer looks at the long ages supposedly expressed in the fossil record, and concludes, quite logically, that as this indicates death on a high order, a loving God cannot exist: “We astute rationalists have no qualms regards the predation of primeval organisms as having commenced as dire necessity well over one billion years ago or more under the most inhospitable of prevailing conditions...The fossil record bares no record of lenity throughout the bulk of an estimated 70 kilometres(sic) deep accumulation of sediments in the whole of the visible fossils geological sequence...benevolence has no place in the realms of reality or survival of the fittest.”