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September 25, 2005
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© Martin Foreman
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Review The Science of God Alister McGrath T & T International, London / New York (2004) A longer version of this article appeared on August 14, 2005. Sitting on my shelves among other artefacts of defunct technologies is a cassette tape of conversational Klingon. For Star Trek fanatics it’s a must-have. For linguists – years ago I trained as one – it’s mildly interesting, with its sound system reminiscent of Scots Gaelic spoken by extrovert Japanese. You can study Klingon through the Klingon Language Institute, learning words such as be’joy’ (ritualized torture by women), borghel (a very small bird whose eggs are considered quite tasty) and porghQeD (the scientific study of body functions). And you can hone your linguistic skills on the Klingon translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. |
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The Language Institute occupies only one corner of an alternative world view that exists complete with its own internal logic and history. Taken together, the cassette, the website and all the other paraphernalia available offer enough circumstantial “evidence” to suggest to the terminally naďve that Klingons actually exist.
Once you accept the “truth” of the basic text (in this case revealed to the world through television and film) everything else falls into place. Where information is missing – such as the full vocabulary of Klingon – self-appointed experts can fill in the gaps. Where there are inconsistencies – such as the very different appearance of Klingons in the original Star Trek and in later versions – those same experts can create elaborate arguments to reassure the faithful that there is a perfectly logical explanation.
I was reminded of Klingon recently when reading Alister McGrath’s 2004 book The Science of God. It’s a scholarly work that, according to the blurb, presents “a scientific theology based on the present and past relationships between Christian theology and the natural sciences”.
I’d read one other book of McGrath’s – The Twilight of Atheism (reviewed here) – and had not been impressed. The author demonstrated little more than the weakness of his intellectual position as he focused on individual atheists rather than atheism itself. The strengths and weaknesses of Madalyn Murray O’Hair (founder of American Atheists), the British National Secular Society, the Soviet Union and the others McGrath is obsessed with are as irrelevant to atheism as the Pope’s underwear is to Christianity. Atheism itself is no more in decline than the value of pi or the color blue.
Nonetheless, I read The Science of God because everyone deserves a second chance. More pretentious than its predecessor, but dealing with ideas rather than with personalities, it is a far better book. McGrath is well-informed and writes well. Although his primary audience is other academics, everyday folk with some intelligence can follow what he is saying.
The basic problem is the Klingon Assumption. Just as the Klingon Language Institute makes no reference to the fact that the warrior race are a figment of Gene Roddenberry’s imagination, McGrath ignores the possibility that his God is equally fictitious. He is so busy politely picking holes in everyone else’s arguments that he forgets to examine the enormous abyss at the center of his.
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