I hear that the Yanks are torturing Saddam Hussein by forcing him repeatedly to watch the episode of South Park in which he has a gay relationship with Satan.
SP aficionados will remember that sensitive Satan finally dumps Saddam, hurt at realising that the dead dictator wants him only for sex.
Is William Reville a SP fan? Has he ever watched the one about Mormons being the answer? Students at University College, Cork, may care to investigate.
Reville is associate professor of biochemistry at UCC, and writes a weekly column, ‘Science Today’, in The Irish Times. On August 24th, he argued that, since it is not possible scientifically to prove or disprove the existence of god, scientists must admit the possibility of god’s existence. Indeed: “There is sufficient evidence in favour of God to make it reasonable to believe. Many scientists have pointed to the fact that the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to facilitate life. If any of a great number of the physical constants of the universe were only slightly different, life could never have evolved...”
If the universe in its billions of years of existence had been differently constituted and organised, it would have evolved differently? Well, yes.
The fact that it has evolved in the way that it has proves that there has been an exquisite fine-tuner at work? Hell, no.
Irish Times readers are entitled to wonder how their newspaper has so dumbed down as to put such arrant nonsense in print in a column headed ‘Science Today’. ‘Superstition Yesterday’ more like.
Convinced that he has established that it’s OK for scientists to believe in god, Reville goes on to suggest that there’s also evidence about which religion god favours.
“Jesus Christ claimed to be in close contact with God, whom he referred to in familiar terms as his father. If we judge that Jesus was sane, if his teachings stake a claim on our hearts and minds, and if we find that abiding by the principles that Jesus taught brings peace and joy into our lives, then it is reasonable for us to accept the word of Jesus about God just as it is for us to accept the word of any tried and tested friend on some matter about which we have no direct experience.”
One of the differences between relying on the word of a tried and tested friend and relying on the word of Jesus is that if you doubt your tried and tested friend’s suggestion, you can ask her or him to repeat it, explain it, deal with objections to it, perhaps respond to a counter-suggestion that the proposition is, in fact, a load of oul’ shite (a circumstance which would certainly arise were the proposition to the effect that, “Did I mention that my da is the Lord of the Universe?”)
Let’s deal now with the Stark basis of Reville’s argument.
Rodney Stark’s US bestseller The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success was the only book cited by Reville in support of his argument. Reville tells us that Stark is “a professor of social science at Baylor University, Texas.”
Reville summarises and endorses the book’s theme: “Christianity accorded a privileged position to reason, unlike other belief systems that emphasised essences and intuition, and this...explains the rise of the West. The Christian God is a rational God who created a rational universe that invites our comprehension. Reason is seen as a gift from God, to be used to increase understanding.”
Stark dismisses the contribution of classical civilisations to enlightenment and scientific progress. The Greeks, he writes, “were indifferent to real science.”
The Greeks, who plotted the paths of the stars, accurately estimated the circumference of the earth and measured the distance between the earth and the moon centuries before Christianity was a gleam in the eye of the deranged St. Paul, dismissed as “indifferent to real science” in a column called ‘Science Today’…
Stark claims, too, “the church fathers taught that reason was the supreme gift from God.” Pre-eminent among the church fathers was Paul, who forthrightly condemned “any philosophy that concerned itself with finding truth in the material world.” 
Stark’s essential argument, and Reville associates himself with it, is that throughout its history Christianity has welcomed scientific investigation and advance, unlike, for example – Stark is explicit about this – Islam.
This has given Stark’s book an acrid political resonance and boosted its sales in the US.

The 13th century Syrian physician Ibn al-Nafis, who discovered the pulmonary circulation of the blood, died in his Damascus bed at an advanced age. The second person to propose the theory, Michael Servetus in the 16th century, died at the stake in Geneva on the instruction of Calvin after refusing to recant.
The reason Satan came so close to overwhelming the forces of heaven had to do with the huge disparity in numbers between the two sides. Only the arrival of Stan (tragic accident, Cartman’s fault) to take over command saved the day. Stan was a strategic genius, having reached level 69 on Play Station 2.
This emerged in the episode of South Park in which it was explained that the reason for the sparse numbers in heaven was, as god himself put it, “Mormons. Mormons was the right answer.”
Stark last hit the headlines about 20 years ago, when he produced a paper proving that the Mormon faith “will soon achieve a worldwide following comparable to that of Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and the other dominant world faiths.” The Latter Day Saints was set to become “the first major faith to appear on earth since the Prophet Mohammed rode out of the desert,” Stark wrote of a word-wide Mormon communion between 60 million and 265 million strong.
The paper caused a middling-sized sensation. Stark was quoted in hundreds of articles, interviewed on serious television programmes. But his celebrity didn’t last. Nobody who looked seriously, scientifically, at the evidence could find any basis for his belief.
The Salt Lake Tribune last month suggested that there may be only 12 million Mormons in the world, as few as a third of them practicing. Despite a massive, continuing Mormon missionary effort, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Assemblies of God and the Pentecostals are all faring better.
Reville doesn’t tell us that Baylor is a “faith” university, based in Waco and run by the Texas Baptist church. Its motto is Pro Exclesia, Pro Texana – for Church, for Texas. Its website’s opening page features a stained-glass style representation of Jesus, and the slogan, “Go teach all nations.” Baylor describes itself as “a private Christian university...We believe that faith and intellect complete one another (and) recognise the value of a Christian learning environment.”
Upcoming “major events” include a “Black Preaching Conference” on September 25th/27th.
Baylor is one of three universities being considered by George W. Bush as the site of a Bush Presidential Library after his scheduled retirement in 2008.
Nothing illegitimate about any of this. But nothing, either, that would encourage a rational person to regard Baylor as a suitable setting for the pursuit of scientific endeavour.
‘Science Today’? You’d find more science any day in South Park Elementary.