Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Web exclusive: Review of Spectator debate on secularism, Islam and Christianity

issue 02 July 2011

Secularism is a greater threat to Christianity than Islam
Royal Geographic Society
June 29th 2011

Chair
Rod Liddle
 
Proposing
Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP
Damian Thompson
Prof Tariq Ramadan
 
Opposing
The Very Rev’d Patrick Sookhdeo
Nick Cohen
Douglas Murray
 
Fr Timothy Radcliffe, a Dominican friar based in Blackfriars Oxford, proposed the motion arguing that secularism appeared in ‘strong and weak’ varieties. Weak secularism meant the exclusion of religion from the public sphere. Strong secularism entailed a belief that the only valid truths are the verifiable and falsifiable propositions approved by science. ‘Strong secularism is dangerous. It threatens Christianity and civilisation because it makes a totalitarian claim for one branch of learning.’ Science cannot cope with the fundamental questions of life which are the domain of philosophy, poetry and religion. Mocking the self-professed ‘secularists’ he knew at university, he said ‘they fell in love and kissed one another for non-scientific purposes.












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