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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