Dear Sir,
Just the Facts please.
It was interesting to read James Harrigan’s “Response” to his “Responders”. So I must clarify my position. I had no intent to ridicule him and am not in any way expecting him to change his beliefs or the views he has based upon them. I was and am writing to show that there are other points of view and to challenge matters of fact.
Mr Harrigan is very big on “righteousness” but this is based on his beliefs which are not shared by most of the world’s population.However he has the right to hold these beliefs. But he says, “I do believe in science to some extent”. Wow! Science is based on fact and is not a matter of belief. Then his “some extent” obviously does not include evolution. Evolution is not a “theory” as it was when Darwin first proposed it 150 years ago. It has been proved over and over since then. Most established religeons, including most Christian denominations, accept it.
The Bible is a book of the beliefs and accumulated teachings based originally on the oral myths and knowledge of a nomadic desert tribe in the Middle East starting over 3,000 years ago, with the final chapters written in the 100 or so years after the death of Jesus. As time passed since then we have gained new knowledge and experience. People in biblical times expected to fall off the edge of the world if they sailed too far from land! We know better now. Look how the Christian Church persecuted Galileo 400 years ago because he said that the earth orbitted the sun yet even the Catholic Church has now acknowledged that it did him wrong. Man can now orbit the Earth himself and we know more about the complexities of the Universe. Times change; knowledge and experience grow; we must do too. We cannot shut our eyes and deny science because it does not agree with some beliefs from another era.
Faith and beliefs may be valuable for giving moral guidance but they cannot be applied to facts. You may believe that the Earth was created 6,000 years, ago as described in Genesis, as most people believed in the time of Darwin’s Christian England, but nowadays the facts of geology, paleontology, archaeology, biology and other sciences show a different picture going back billions of years. I hope the children of Mr Harrigan’s congregation do not have evolution denied to them, as he did in his article, as this would be in conflict with their education. However one hopes that their education will teach them the truth and set them free from the bonds of such narrow beliefs.
Light and Truth
Editor’s note:
The views expressed in the above article are those of the writer and not necessarily those of The Anguillian newspaper.
