Editor responds:
As expressed to you privately Mark, it was an oversight on my part in not contacting you at the time, as I overlooked you while concentrating on the Air New Zealand side of things. Unfortunately given the heat created by our troop flights revelation, nobody wished to assist further on this particular aspect in case it lead to their own identification as a source. The magazine must protect its sources at the end of the day, and I’m sure you can understand that. But I do apologise for not seeking comment – it wasn’t intentional, and we certainly will if the need arises in future.
I BELIEVE I have been an agnostic for whole my short life from a newborn till I was 14. When people have asked me about if I believe in God, I have said “I dunno”. Then after my parents’ divorce – and my dad getting a new girlfriend who is really religious – I lost my faith. I was 15 then. She dragged me to church every Sunday and I never wanted to go. I became a hardcore atheist and every time someone said the word “God” I became angry. I didn’t understand how anyone could find God from the church, where the priest reads a page or two out of the Bible and then preaches for an hour about what he THINKS the pages were trying to say. I’m talking about the Lutheran church, it’s big in Scandinavia. I came last year to NZ as an exchange student. I am 16 now. I started to believe in God here.. or at least I wanted to. There are just so many clues that indicated that there is a higher force, some one who is far bigger and better. My host dad got a book from our neighbour as a birthday present. The book was Eve’s Bite. He was totally blown away and I started to read the book. And I just need to say, you have totally converted me! All those facts were the stuff I needed to really believe. I just finished reading The Divinity Code and I had an urge to try and contact you and tell how much you have influenced me! I hope you get this e-mail. Thank you very much! Zandra from Scandinavia
and randomly-caused. How could a single-celled organism know in advance that in order to succeed it needed to believe in an imaginary friend called ‘God’?” Randomly-caused is the key phrase, in the sense of mutations. In the absence of any guiding hand, a mutation happens and it may either be beneficial or harmful. In most observed cases they are harmful, but that’s irrelevant. Natural selection then kicks in, and supposedly a beneficial mutation will survive to enter the community and a harmful one will not. Natural selection works on advantages, and thus is not random… but mutations are. Evolution, in its wider sense, meanwhile, definitely is purposeless. It goes where the winds of change and natural selection take it…it has no “end goal” in mind. Suppose natural selection threw up someone with a predisposition to believe in a non-existent Sky Fairy who would rescue him from anything bad. If the Sky Fairy actually didn’t exist, how long do you think it would be before that individual’s defective optimism saw him squashed like a bug, taking his genes with him? To my mind, the argument that evolution guided religious belief is nonsensical, for that reason alone, let alone many others. Who is more likely to survive an impending sabre-tooth tiger attack, the caveman who erroneously believed in a non-existent deity and stood there confidently praying, or the one who threw the cat the buffalo steak he was cooking and hightailed it out of there? If God doesn’t exist, prayers don’t get answered no matter how much the evolutionary voice in your head might tell you so. Purely as an aside, blogger Barnsley Bill, posting on the No Minister site recently, relayed this hilarious oldie-but-a-goodie that I’m sure you’ll also find amusing in the context of this discussion:
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DISGRUNTLED ATHEIST WRITES I brought your book recently and I was wondering if it would be possible to get my money back. My reason you ask? Because your book claims to be “Explosive new evidence” and “explosive scientific and historical evidence” when it really isn’t. To be honest I found it hard to read past the first few chapters because it is very obvious you don’t know what you are talking about. Examples? Why sure! Your statement that evolution is “random and purposeless” makes it very obvious that you don’t know what you are talking about. When you claimed that Stephen Hawking was wrong, doubt again began to arise. Or maybe your complete and utter disregard for things like culture and gene behaviour when you claim that Neanderthals should be as intelligent and as literate as us. If you want I can pick apart your book even more, in fact me and my friend take pleasure in exposing frauds like you. So feel free to email back and we can have a friendly discussion :) Michael Rowlands, via email Editor responds:
Sure Michael, but given your current foray do you think you’re up to it? :) For example, you quoted me out of context on the evolution/random/ purposeless bit. What I actually wrote was: “Examine the last part of that statement for a moment. It’s the idea that evolution created the idea of God in our heads. Yet evolution is supposed to be purposeless
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12/18/07 11:36:25 AM