Centre for Inquiry

Science vs. Religion Part 4: All in the Mind
Dr. Raj Persaud

Dr. Raj Persaud

The final talk at the CFI ‘Science vs. Religion’ event was a talk by Dr. Raj Persaud a well known psychiatrist and TV personality (who has been in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons recently). Unfortunately, I found this talk to be the weakest of the four but this is somewhat understandable given that Dr. Persaud was a last minute replacement covering for Baroness Mary Warnock’s absence.

His talk was lacking any real underlying topic or coherent message and instead was a sort of mishmash of separate topics that seemed to have been cobbled together in order that the two topics of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ got a mention. As a result, I got the impression that his appearance at the event may have been due to a frantic last minute search (and a personal favour to the organisers) rather than because he had a lot to say on the topic of ‘Science vs. Religion’.

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Science vs. Religion Part 3: So, there is no God!
Good God/Evil God: One in the same?

Good God/Evil God: One in the same?

The third talk at the CFI ‘Science vs. Religion’ event was a discussion by the philosopher and head of CFI London Stephen Law on ‘the empirical evidence against God’.

From the title of the talk I was expecting a whistle stop tour through topics such as abiogenesis, evolution and some of the scientific theories of the origin of the universe however none of these subjects were touched and, in actual fact, I didn’t really note any ’empirical evidence’ being discussed. Instead, what Stephen Law presented in his talk, seemed to me to be more a philosophical argument against the monotheistic concept of God. I realise it is a distinct possibility that the philosophical definition of empirical means something entirely different than from what I understand, however, my definition of empirical is something like ‘evidence that can be scientifically identified and tested’ and in this regard Law’s talk was somewhat lacking.

With that said the philosophical argument he did present was quite interesting and entertaining and from my perspective it seemed to be quite well argued. The central thesis of the argument was that you could replace a ‘Good God’ with an ‘Evil God’ in the most common arguments used to defend a Good God’s existence and they work just as well in reverse, suggesting that they are not particularly compelling arguments as they can be used to defend the existence of any type of God, even seemingly absurd ones like ‘Evil God’.

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Science vs. Religion Part 1: “God did it!”

Globe Hand 2So another month, another Centre for Inquiry event and another series of four reviews on the talks provided.

This time the theme for the four lectures was ‘Science and Religion‘- a topic close to my heart, and the speakers were Dr. Jack Cohen– a reproductive biologist, Simon Singh– a popular science writer (and the defendant in an important upcoming courtcase), Stephen Law– a philosopher and provost of the London Centre for Inquiry and Dr. Raj Persaud– a psychiatrist who frequently appears on TV (and has recently been embroiled in some scandal). Baroness Mary Warnock an influential philosopher pulled out at the last minute so unfortunately her talk on ‘religion as humanism’ was missing, which was a shame as it sounded interesting.

This post will be covering the talk of the first speaker Professor Jack Cohen titled ‘The Evidence for Evolution’.

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