The Scientific Indian

I accidentally caught the program titled The Trouble With Atheism yesterday on Channel4. I was astonished to find the host Rod Liddle make so many factual errors, erraneous interpretations and misrepresentations. It felt like my brain was being fried constantly.

I am feeling very charitable today so let me just say the program is a piece of turd hurled in the general direction of thinking people by Rod Liddle. You better duck behind some furniture whenever it airs. Some discussions at the Channel4 forums. The first forum post goes like this:

Rod Liddle talks bollox about why he thinks atheists are as bad as fundamentalists.

Watch it, get angry, try not to vomit, and expect our resident theists to come here and gloat.

If Liddle was an Ostrich he just jumped off a cliff and is flapping his wings vigorously. A few things I recall that exhibited an enormous lack of scientific literacy and judgement:-
-"Evolution has direction." A common misinterpretation that Mr Liddle makes often and revels in.
-"Darwinism will be completely rewritten because so many things in it have been disproved". Uh oh. Liddle doesn't know anything about Darwinism and he doesn't know that.
-"Atheists are immoral". The usual suspects like Stalin and Hitler are there. What Liddle doesn't say is this. Stalin and Hitler did not use Atheism as a reason for their actions. (The fact that Hitler was an atheist is disputed, incidentally).

I understand program producers and hosts need a narrative. But in this case the narrative has been infused with a load of crapola logic and Liddle's delusions. Here are the issues that the program supposedly deals with as documented at the site. It's ill-conceived, terribly documented and lacks any sort coherence.