Letters | 8 January 2011

Godly geologists

Sir: Bruce Anderson’s article in your Christmas special (‘Confession of an atheist’, 18/25 December) was a great example of the thoughtful and reasonable atheism of which we have been starved over recent years.

That said, he still makes one howling and oft-repeated error when he claims that Christianity never recovered ‘from the loss of medieval cosmology and the emergence of modern geology’.

The idea that it was science that was somehow responsible for the waning of Western religion is a relatively recent one, its origins lying in a number of popular but egregious histories of the two disciplines published in the late 19th century. It is badly wide of the mark.

The scientific revolution has its origins in narrowly Christian convictions. The founders of the Royal Society were deeply devout men, spurred on in their work by the presuppositions that creation was ordered, rational and comprehensible, and that by studying it they would better understand and glorify God.

Similarly, the first geologists (in Britain at least) were clergyman (William Buckland) or devout (Charles Lyell). Adam Sedgwick (another reverend geologist) spoke for many when he wrote in his unpublished autobiography, ‘I am thankful that I have spent so much of my life in direct communion with nature, which is the reflection of the power, wisdom, and goodness of God.’ Geology may have unsettled some but it secularised very few.

The reasons for the decline of Christianity in the West are as numerous as they are complex but they have surprisingly little to do with science.

Nick Spencer
Research Director, Theos, London SW1


Islam’s Rembrandts

Sir: Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 11 December) is misleading on two fronts. ‘Because of Islam’s prohibition of the depiction of the human face,’ he says, ‘Muslim countries have not had their Rembrandts or their Caravaggios.