Category Archives: Atheism

Dawkins’ dilemmas

Thought

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Melvin Tinker puts the work of evolutionary theorist and arch-atheist Richard Dawkins under the microscope.

A vicar was travelling on the train one day when a scientist happened to sit next to him. The scientist was an astronomer, and he smiled as he saw the vicar reading his Bible. He said, condescendingly, “I like to think that religion can be summed up by the words, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’”. The vicar, having discovered the scientist’s profession, replied, “Yes, and I like to think that astronomy can be summed up by the words, ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are’”.

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Did Christianity really decline?

Review

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The Death of Christian Britain

The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding secularization 1800–2000
Callum G. Brown
Routledge, London and New York, 2001, 256pp.

It’s an ironic title, is it not? After all, Britain is still, obviously, a place where a mainstream publisher will take on a book which is entirely about the social significance of Christianity and which argues against the assumptions of secularist theory. Moreover, the first chapter, which describes “the Christian churches in crisis”, quotes,

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