For all that, it was the amazing number of different activities going on
every week at Wesley’s Chapel that caught my attention most when I first
arrived. The Boys’ Brigade, the theological meetings and all sorts of events
kept me and keep me constantly spoilt for choice. This year, I also had
the opportunity to attend a special service organised for the ordination of
Methodist ministers and I found it very interesting.
I am thus very excited about having spent two summers at Wesley’s Chapel
surrounded by all my Methodist friends. London is surely the perfect city to be
in. The only problem is to choose where to go and what to do because, as Samuel
Johnson once said, ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’.
Jean David Eynard
Book review
The Mystery of the Last Supper: Reconstructing the Final Days of Jesus. Cambridge
University Press. 244pp., 2011. By Sir Colin Humphreys, guest speaker at the
2012 AWAYDAY (pictured)
Oxford University, ‘the home of lost causes’,
created the Professorship for the Public
Understanding of Science specifically for Richard
Dawkins because his original research does
not really merit an academic Professorship.
So deluded with the world – and it appears
also God – is the now ex-Professor that he
is quite happy to remain in ignorance of
other disciplines in the Socratic quest for
understanding and enlightenment. Dawkins
writes in The God Delusion that ‘The only
difference between The Da Vinci Code and the
gospels is that the gospels are ancient fiction
while The Da Vinci Code is modern fiction. What
I, as a scientist believe (for example, evolution),
I believe not because of reading a holy book,
but because I have studied the evidence.’ There
are multiple ‘howlers’ in this assertion, not to mention anachronisms and
woolly-mindedness, which mean that not only has Dawkins not ‘studied’ the
‘evidence’, but he has no knowledge of the multidisciplinary methodologies
other academics use to seek elucidation in such questions.
Most might leave Professor Emeritus Dawkins to his delusions of monodisciplinary omniscience. However, we are fortunate at Cambridge University
to have Sir Colin J. Humphreys, whose day job is to be Professor and Director
of Research at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, but whose
private passion is the use of astrophysics, astronomy, archaeology and textual
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