I see that a video of the recent debate between Alister McGrath and Peter Atkins is now available here. The topic of the debate is: Darwin and Humanity: should we rid the mind of God?
The sound quality is somewhat suspect for Peter Atkins, but stick with it. Clearly God is on McGrath’s side – or at least the sound engineer is.
I have to say that I was very unimpressed by McGrath – he sounded just like a trendy vicar giving a sermon, with the amount of his handwaving counterbalanced by the shallowness of his arguments. And I marvelled when he said:
"When I was young I used to be an amateur astronomer, I used to look at the night sky and I knew just enough astronomy to know that the light from some of those stars wouldn’t hit earth for hundreds of years and to me, that simply said to me, you will be dead by then and so the night sky was a symbol of melancholy, a reminder of the brevity of life."
It sounded to me as though he needs God so that he has meaning to his life. I don’t. When I look at the night sky, I too realise the same fact about stellar distances, but that to me is amazing, not melancholic, and, I might add, that knowledge has come through scientific advance and not through theology.
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