Utopian pipe dreams. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: In the May 2003 issue were two letters and a lead article that might best be classified under the general title "Revenge of the Utopians". We begin with Andrew McIntyre's rabid, anti-Christian polemic against an excerpt of Michael Casey's book, "Solving the Problem of Meaningless". I don't suppose there has been a better case of getting the bull by the horns since Theseus tackled the Minotaur. The twentieth century, according to McIntyre, has been the best of all centuries because less than two per cent of people were killed in wars or other acts of violence. Alexander Solzhenitsyn where are you? And it was good because of secularisation. As Sam Johnson said (in a different context) "to comment on the folly of the fiction ... is to waste criticism on unresisting imbecility". Furthermore, to suppose that Christians hate the world is a notion so utterly untrue as to take reason captive and paralyse criticism. Does McIntyre know anything about the world-hating non-Christian gnostics of the early Christian centuries? If he reads Professor E.R. Dodds on this subject (Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety), he might get a rude shock.

There follows Anthony Seiver's little religious tract on sacred Darwinism. Seiver has obviously not read either David Stove or Mary Midgley on this subject. It's a pity. He might have avoided making such a fool of himself. Darwinian orthodoxy is his doxy. Heterodoxy is everyone else's doxy. There is a big difference between evolutionary theory and Darwinian dogmatism. He fails to realise that every human position on the ...