I see you are again publishing letters on the pros and cons for the existence of an absolute and almighty God. Since I pray each day that His Name be holy, I hereby publicly agree with Mr Roger Williams’ assessment (SN, December 23, 2009) of Dr Ian McDonald’s article of December 20.
Mr Mahadeo Panchu is right (January 11) that Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion has been hailed by churchmen.
However, this is really an indictment of such churchmen, who now seem to be in the overwhelming majority in their inability to even understand the consequences of the theory of evolution.
It is far easier for them to assume the current academic fashion of an air of neutrality while Dawkins and others like him assiduously erode the foundations of faith in God.
Before Dawkins wrote his much acclaimed The Blind Watchmaker, which I might still have somewhere, I went to study Theology at the Catholic Theological Sem-inary of The Free University of Berlin. All the learned professors there and everyone that ever visited during my time there believed in the theory of evolution.
Their answer was to evolve a ‘scholarship’ of the Bible that assigned uncertainties and fable value to parts of the Bible selected by them, and to perpetuate it by certifying their seminarians. My research indicated that this started to happen systematically after 1925.
Therefore it will be hard to find a churchman of such academic ilk in the world, much less Guyana, who can refute the misrepresentations of Dawkins.
Those who do attain high enough learning to do so have either studied the evidence themselves, like I did, and/or went to universities/seminaries that are ‘not recognised.’ One should also not assume that all professed churchmen of today would even have read the entire Bible, because their primary goal is gain approval in the sight of men as to how many of the works of men they have studied.
The irony is that the infallible teachings of the Catholic Church, the Magisterium, contain no admission that anything other than the creation of the cosmos as written in the beginning of the Bible is true. God created everything in six days and rested on the seventh.
Yours faithfully,
Alfred Bhulai
Editor’s note
Our policy on the non-publication of letters arguing for or against the existence of God has not changed. We were, however, forced to suspend it temporarily to allow readers the right to respond to Dr McDonald’s column on this topic, since it had appeared in this newspaper.
Correspondence on this subject is now closed.
