Anglican reason drought
Who: Rev Canon Angel Tilby
What: Christian (Anglican)
Where: Retired
(Canon emeritus Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford)
LISTEN TO PODCAST
Transcript of the Radio 4 broadcast
Podcast script
This Second Thought podcast is in response to the BBC’s TftD from 17 April 2025. It was by Canon Angela Tilby, a retired Anglican priest in Oxford.
Angela really is the gift that keeps on giving. At least she is if you’re hoping to receive a drought of reason. This one is pretty awful but you should listen to Tilby’s broadcast; it’s a real car crash.
Here’s a quote from around 45 seconds in:
TILBY: It’s tempting, in these days of so much conflict and dysfunction, to lose hope—especially when we recognise the concealments that go into our politics, and the rumours and speculation spread by social media.
Is it tempting? You know, generally? For all of us?
Likely not, don’t you think? You Angela may be tempted into hopelessness. Why pronounce that your listeners will be similarly lacking in resilience?
Tell me more about these days of much conflict and dysfunction? So much, compared to when? What dysfunction, compared to where?
What are these concealments that go into our politics? If they are concealed, how do we know they are there?
This is a pile-up of logical transgressions. We have a hanging comparison with much conflict. Unsupported generalisation. Groundless claims and a pretty strong argument for incoherence. In these sentences from Angela, they are of little consequence but they each distort the truth, and they were so easy to avoid. First, though, there is a real howler here that needs some attention.
Angela’s invocation of conflict, dysfunction and concealments are vague and speculative. In other words, they constitute groundless rumour.
It’s not social media that is spreading rumour and speculation; it’s Angela chuffing Tilby.
She also said:
TILBY: At a time when, as a nation, we are unsure who our friends and allies really are, it’s easy to conclude that our world is dark—and getting darker.
When faith leaders are spreading vague and unsupported rumour on national radio while blaming others for doing the same it can indeed be difficult to be sure who our friends really are.
What Angela said about conflict and social media is so vague it’s impossible to determine what she may have meant. I suggest that either she doesn’t know, or something prevented her from stating it clearly.
Frankly, I suspect the former but a charitable possible case of the latter is that writing what she meant would have made her uneasy.
Perhaps what she really wanted to say was that Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping are liars and Trump is spreading his lies by social media, and this is another reason some might feel hopeless.
It’s reasonable to imagine that publishing a statement like that would invite an unpleasant backlash from Maga Christians in the US. Not something, perhaps, a retired British priest would want to precipitate.
That’s still no excuse for bad writing. This is BBC Radio 4. The Today programme. Six million listeners. She’s speaking in the middle of a significant news broadcast made possible by a huge team of extremely talented presenters, researchers, writers and producers. Failing to make her broadcast clear and accurate shows indifference and disrespect to the audience, to the BBC and to the team of professionals whose show she hijacked for three minutes.
And it was all so unnecessary. Through laziness or incompetence Agela deftly avoided a perfectly acceptable sentence such as,
With all the reports of conflict and dysfunction that fill our newspapers, some could be tempted to lose hope;
It barely has a pulse but at least it contains no groundless assumptions, hanging comparatives, false claims or factual inaccuracies. The phrase Tilby delivered next (the meanderment on concealments, politics, speculation and social media) is more problematic as we really have no idea what she meant, but we can take a guess. Maybe she meant something like:
Especially when at the same time, the leadership of one of our strongest allies appears to have abandoned objective truth and has commandeered social media to spread propaganda.
And if the second sentence felt a little too risky, she should have cut it out.
Anyway, what next?
Oh yes, Tilby made a comment on the biblical account of creation:
TILBY: The separation of light from darkness in the Bible is the basis not only of its cosmology but its morality. God separates light from darkness. Only the light is called good.
Really Angela? Doesn’t this seem like a bit of convenient cherry picking? Let’s back up a little. Let’s back up a lot, all the way to genesis. Here’s the whole of the relevant section, among the best-known of all biblical passages, from Genesis chapter one verses 1 to 5:
Genesis chapter 1 verses 1-5
- In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
- And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
- And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
- And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
- And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
It seems pretty plain from the above that god called only the light good because god was commenting on a specific change that was sought, not because there was anything intrinsically wrong with darkness.
The first attempt at creating Earth was clearly a rough-start to which this god would be making revisions and additions, allegedly it was empty, formless and dark. Like god’s hit the centre of the potter’s wheel and could now set about imposing orderly will on the misshapen lump.
One could also infer from this passage that this god had no such problems with the creation of heaven? Apparently our god in this story was able to knock out a perfectly acceptable heaven at the first go. Right balance of dark, and light. Acceptable mix of things that fly, and things that walk. No aberrations of shape. No need for god’s wind upon the surface of the heavenly waters to conjure up the desired alternatives to emptiness.
Was the Earth an afterthought? Had god not emptied the tube of universe creation goo? Figured it would be fun to see what might be possible with the dregs? Easy to see how dangerous it is attempting to draw meaning from a collection of ancient Hebrew scribblings?
Back to the misshapen lump of Earth. For the first addition, god summoned up some light (that faint crashing was the collapse of my pottery simile). The light was observed and god noted that the light was good. Perhaps we’ll be safer with analogy than simile.
Imagine building a shed in a field. It’s a lovely field, but you want in it, a shed. Upon finishing the shed you punch the air and celebrate cool shed vibes. You pronounce the shed to be good. Should we conclude that there is something wrong with the fields that don’t have sheds? There is certainly no reason to conclude that, given the available information. Even if the field had not been described at the outset as lovely, there is still nothing there to suggest that a field is not at least as good as a shed. Not, at least, unless you’re a retired Anglican priest who’s presumably never approached the text upon which her religion is founded with anything even approaching curiosity.
She, or course, had faith. And what use if curiosity when you have faith?
She later says:
Honesty calls us to acknowledge darkness while seeking to live in the light.
What on Earth does this mean? Is the darkness just an absence of light? An absence of knowledge? A presence of evil? To be honest, it’s indistinguishable from a Star Wars trailer?
She also, for reasons I don’t fully yet understand, says this.
TILBY: Yet we still yearn for truth and believe that evidence and conscience and for many of us faith can guide us to live with integrity.
It’s not been my experience that enthusiastic Christians, and I acknowledge that there are exceptions, it’s not been my experience that enthusiastic Christians yearn much for truth. Enthusiastic Christians tend to behave as though they have the truth. I’ve met one or two who demonstrate remarkable imperviousness to subsequent challenge of this truth by fact or philosophy.
This is another unforgivably incoherent ramble from Angela Tilby. What does she have in store for us next time.
Second Thought podcast with Dan Beach 
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