Regular readers of this column will know that from time to time I can drift into a sort of philosophical and theological reverie and muse on things which were voiced by Sergeant Willis in G&S’s Iolanthe, “I think of things that would astonish you!” And so, this month, I wanted to give readers a summarised explanation of why Cardinal, now Saint John Henry Newman concluded that a belief in God had a fully natural and logical basis and was not, as secularists say, irrational.
As usual I gave the first printed draft to my wife to read. I did not have to wait long for her judgement. She sallied into the office and said, “I almost got to the end of page one but found that I had lost the will to live.”
I knew immediately that I had failed to summarise how, in his book Grammar and Assent, Newman used the same deductive and inductive logical thinking also used by two ancient Greek philosophers. Leucippus and Democritus had reasoned that matter is made up of randomly moving invisible particles which they named atoms. It was they who gave us the language to understand atomic structures, something that would not be seen until two and a half thousand years had passed. They, like Saint John Newman, built mental models to understand and explain the world around them. The evidence was there but nobody had ever noticed it before.
I really wanted to explain how these men arrived at their conclusion, but my wife is right. This column is not a dissertation, and its readers do not require evidence of original thinking and intellectual rigour in every written phrase. This means therefore, that if readers want the insights of three great minds’ they must get it for themselves. My wife however may not be particularly interested in atoms, but she is interested in Tasking us with yet another year of lambing.
Talking of tasks, The Gloucestershire born William Tyndale from Stinchcombe managed to translate and print the bible in English during 1536 but, as is usual, the ruling elites of the day who didn’t want ordinary folk reading the bible, were poor losers, and so burned him at the stake.
However, their loss is our gain, and today we can read words in the New Testament spoken by a revolutionary messianic prophet, healer, and spiritual leader. One who saw beyond the procedures, rites, and routines of organised religion, and taught us that we are sojourners on this earth. Jesus also demonstrated that personal life is not just a beginning and an end but is a continuum of existence with the purpose of progressive development of the soul. He then assured us that Christian life on earth is about personal hope and action not about societal fear and passivity.
But talking of societal fear; (and there is a lot around) I see that social media sites detect trends in subject-matter, and then relay them to millions of people around the world. This means that within a few hours it can appear that a single issue has become a global consensus. However, there can be dangerous consequences if people. come to believe that millions of voices speak as one. Imagine the problem faced by a responsible public figure who faces a TV News interviewer who asks, “What are you going to do about it”, even though the topic has only come to the top of a rolling news agenda an hour earlier. Fear is easily spread: In the case of sheep it can take only 60 seconds for them to change from being calm and docile to panic. Rolling news and social media can have the same effect on humans in just over an hour.
To close. Recently, I read a German study into the deleterious effect on insects of radiation from radio waves. Suspicion of this has been circulating for years’, but because insects are critical to the food chain of every living thing it seems to me that the situation ought to warrant more immediate attention than many other things. Especially those woke issues currently clogging up the air waves. In the last twenty years millions more radio masts have been erected, and so the German study will undoubtedly stimulate more research. But will action follow?
With tongue in cheek, can I suggest that, as social media now generates most of the wireless radiation: every mobile device connected to it should be automatically turned off as soon as it has reached its daily allotted total of, say, forty minutes. The benefit to insects would be immediate, and I doubt the world would lose any of its functionality.
There would be the usual protestors and maybe even some new ones, but they should all be told to find more efficient ways to save the world they are now so thoughtlessly destroying. As insects are vital in the food chain, I offer this slogan to any insect conservation campaign ……….
“Stop Radiation Litter and spend less time on Twitter”
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