012 The week that ended Easter, and a Pope.

Tilby again fails to think.
Smith provides blatant example of belief presented as fact.
McDonald will need a whole new episode.

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21 April – Jennifer Smith Radio 4 broadcast

22 April – Vincent Nichols Radio 4 broadcast

23 April – Angela Tilby Radio 4 broadcast

24 April – Chine McDonald Radio 4 broadcast

25 April – Rob Marshall Radio 4 broadcast

26 April – Catherine Pepinster Radio 4 broadcast

28 April – David Wilkinson Radio 4 broadcast

The BBC

Transcript of the Radio 4 broadcasts

Podcast script

Welcome to the Second Thought podcast. For show notes, links and transcripts, please visit secondthoughtfortheday.com.

Between 21 – 28 April there were seven TsftD. All were presented by Christians, perhaps to be expected in a week that saw the end of both Easter and a Pope.

Alarmingly for me, one could almost claim there had been an outbreak of reason from the faithful presenters of TftD.

There was nonsense here and there and errors of fact and logic, but the error rate appeared to dip. I’m not, though, holding my breath.

So, from those seven in late April…

Jennifer Smith, a Methodist, managed to tie herself in logical knots over truth and faith as they pertain to Christ’s resurrection. We’ll dig into that. Beside this, her broadcast was harmless and focused mostly on children’s books and the importance of stories.

Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster was wheeled out on the day of the Pope’s death. He indulged in a small degree of nonsense but appeared to do an creditable job of remembering and celebrating the life of Pope Francis.

Angela Tilby, once again demonstrated her capacity for logic dodging, this time with inspiration from St George. That said, by her standards, Tilby’s broadcast was approaching reasonable. The error count was down a little but the quality of her errors grew magnificently to compensate. She drew almost entirely from the most recent book of historian Bijan Omrani. On first glance, this book appears to be a provincial version of Tom Holland’s book Dominion. Holland sought to demonstrate that so much of who we are, our culture and how we think is inescapably influenced by Christianity. Dominion was about how Christianity has reshaped the world. Omrani’s book is called God is an Englishman. It appears to do similar to Dominion just with a somewhat more narrow scope. Whatever the merits of the ideas and books of Omrani and Holland, Tilby cites one of them in a way that we’ll not be overlooking.

Rob Marshall, an Anglican priest, sought inspiration from TV’s Race Across the World. As Douglas Adams might put it, Mostly Harmless.

Pepinster, a Catholic commentator, took TftD duties on the day of the Pope’s funeral.

David Wilkinson, a Methodist theologian, produced a segue from the death of the Pope to the subject of local elections.

We can also be grateful to Christian writer and commentator Chine McDonald for her contribution to the restoration of normal service during this week of eggs, bunnies and a death in the Vatican. She focused on doubt, and pope Francis as a religious leader not afraid of it. It will be necessary to spend a little time on the central tenet of McDonald’s contribution, which is the essential nature of doubt for faith. A truism if ever there was one. MacDonald also blindly cited a controversial poll on church attendance which suggested increased attendance among the young, changes that fly in the face of all that is sensible, not to mention all other available evidence.

Let’s first, though, take a brief look at those minor transgressions of Smith and Tilby.

This is what Jennifer Smith said on 21 April, Easter Monday.

SMITH: At easter Jesus’ disciples were full of wonder at the news he was alive, the tomb was empty – but that did not mean they understood what had happened or went off into some magical happily ever after. Stories spread like wildfire: “Is it really him? Can we trust what we’ve heard?” The danger around them was real, and they were still confused about what to do. Some saw him on the road, some in a garden – not all in moments of faith, but it was never their faith that made the resurrection true.

So what, in this context, does, “moments of faith” mean?

My contention is that it is meaningless. It may have meaning for Jen but understanding of meaning has to be shared before any communication value is achieved.

The internet, unsurprisingly, was awash with suggestions for what a faith moment is:

The moment you decide to commit to your faith.
A moment when you feel your god has intervened in the events of your life.
A moment when something surprising and positive happens that makes you feel grateful for the grace of your god.
A moment when faith is tested/required.
A moment that brings you closer to your god.

Notwithstanding the essential role for a god (presumably in which to have the faith) the only constant in the various offerings, is that a faith moment is universally and wholly subjective. That being the case, how on Earth would a methodist preacher in the third millennium of the common era know which were moments of faith for characters in a religion origin story from the time of the Roman Empire?

Sorry, Jenifer, this is gibberish. Even if you have a sound understanding of what you mean by your words, you are going to have to express that meaning in words that others can be expected to understand. Not doing that is lazy and, frankly, insulting.

Then Jennifer really drops the ball.

SMITH “… it was never their faith that made the resurrection true.” What?

Not only did we have to endure rambling incoherence on faith moments but here a blatant presentation of belief as fact. Sure, Jenny, you go ahead and believe that an incarnation of your preferred superbeing was able to live again after death. You have faith so you’re in no need of evidence. Great, glad that works for you.

Smith must surely be aware, though, that this faith she has is not universally held?

Millions upon millions do not have a faith-based belief in a Christian god.

It’s from a little under 6,000 years ago that we have evidence of the first claims of gods’ existence, and in all that time we have no objective evidence that supernatural beings exist. Yet we have overwhelming objective evidence that natural beings don’t return to life after their deaths. It seems appropriate to forgive the millions who (quite reasonably) don’t believe in superbeings for dismissing Jennifer’s belief as absurd.

For her, then, to present her belief as fact is not only unreasonable, isn’t it not more than a little arrogant?

On to Angla Tilby. Tilby, it seems, is barely able to utter a word without saying something demonstrably false or coherent. She manages all this with an earnest pulpit-honed preaching voice that makes her delivery of error after error all the more amusing.

TILBY: Our culture is one of many products of Western Catholicism, something worth remembering after Pope Francis’ death on Monday. Our Catholic roots ensured that rulers had to reckon with the idea that there was a higher authority than earthly power; our monarchs, nobility and justice were ultimately constrained by the rule of law. So no dictators. Think here of Alfred the Great, Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus and the insistence that fairness and redress should be available to all, the humble as well as the mighty.

It seems likely there’s a lot of truth in what Omrani has written. But until we’ve read his book we can’t know if it was his writing or Tilby’s treatment of it that presents such an affront to reason.

First, we have ridiculous case of English exceptionalism that results in a truly preposterous claim.

So what is exceptionalism and what’s wrong with it? The single best illustration I’ve encountered was in the first episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. A TV show from 2012. It’s exceptional television. Jeff Daniels stars Will McAvoy as a TV news anchor alongside Emily Mortimer as his producer, McKenzie McHale. The scene is a panel discussion at a US university and the panel are taking answers from the students in the auditorium, Daniels’ character Will is on the panel. One bright-faced young scholar, no doubt full of grades and potential, asked what makes America the greatest country in the world. McAvoy is clearly finding the whole experience tiresome. With some justification. He’s begun to disengage. Both his producer (who appears to be prompting Will from the back of the auditorium) and the host of the panel notice and are unwilling to let him cruise.

NEWSROOM CLIP

Professor: Will.

Will: The New York Jets.

Professor: No, I’m gonna hold you to an answer on that. What makes America the greatest country in the world?

Will: Well, Lewis and Sharon said it–diversity and opportunity and freedom and freedom.

Professor: I’m not letting you go back to the airport without answering the question.

Will remains evasive. Fear perhaps of being cancelled for answering honestly. We cut to McKenzie in the audience holding a sheet of paper for Will to see on which she’s written, IT’S NOT.

Will: Well, our Constitution is a masterpiece. James Madison was a genius. The Declaration of Independence is, for me, the single greatest piece of American writing.

Will: You don’t look satisfied.

Professor: One’s a set of laws and the other’s a declaration of war. I want a human moment from you.

Cut from the stage to McKenzie again at the back. This time her prompt says, BUT IT COULD BE.

Professor: What about the people? Why is America–

Will: It’s not the greatest country in the world, Professor. That’s my answer.

Professor: You’re saying–

Will: Yes.

Professor: Let’s talk about–

Will: Sharon. [edit] You know why people don’t like liberals? Because they lose.

Sharon: Hey–

Will: And with a straight face you’re gonna tell students that America is so star-spangled awesome that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia. Belgium has freedom! 207 Sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom.

Professor: All right–

Will: And, yeah, you, sorority girl. Just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there are some things you should know, and one of them is there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies. Now, none of this is the fault of a 20-year- old college student, but you nonetheless are without a doubt a member of the worst period generation period ever period. So when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what [edit] you’re talking about.

That college student in Newsroom, and the other panel members, were demonstrating exceptionalism. In this case, American exceptionalism.

They innately believed that America was the best country in the world. Despite all the objective evidence with which they were presented, how many in that audience do you imagine felt any differently about that idea the following day?

There is political value in exceptionalism, even when expressed cynically.

The Chinese when negotiating at nuclear non-proliferation talks, claim that all Western ethical frameworks for judgement are novel and narrow, both consequences of Christian origins. In contrast they claim that they have had a civilisation with its own ethics that predates Christianity by at least 3,000 years. An ethical heritage of such veneration can clearly dismiss the fripperies of western nations and their barely formed ideas of morality. Christians feed this position by claiming that they are indeed the source of western morality. And so the Chinese rub their hands and expand their navy and plan the production of more warheads, because the ethical positions of the US and the UK and France can be dismissed as irrelevant. Allowing religion to guide politics gives oxygen to exceptionalism. And Exceptionalism can lead to energy and a shared sense of destiny but it can also blind you to your own flaws and make you impervious to good advice. McAvoy, in Newsroom, goes on to deliver a speech on a time when he believed America was the greatest country on Earth. Within it there are many further criticisms of America in 2012, and much upon which the exceptionalists can reflect. You should seek it out, the whole thing is very good.

Tilby’s exceptionalism is about England. It’s no better than American or Chinese exceptionalism. It seems that she liked what she read in Omrani’s book and got rather carried away with the accomplishments of the English as servants of her church, and utterly failed to spot the enormous flaw in her thinking.

She said that our English Catholic roots ensured that rulers had to reckon with the idea that there was a higher authority than earthly power; our monarchs, nobility and justice were ultimately constrained by the rule of law.

TILBY: So no dictators. Think here of Alfred the Great, Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus and the insistence that fairness and redress should be available to all, the humble as well as the mighty.

Great stuff. And right on! England was pretty good at serving up the good stuff while our neighbours haplessly built beginner empires and served deeply suspicious if delicious food. But I wonder if the same thing bothers you that began to gnaw at me about these consequences of Catholic roots?

Spain, for example, has the same Catholic roots as England, as does Portugal. Italy is home to those Catholic roots. Germany, guess what? Same Catholic roots.

So, Tilby, tell us this… how do we explain Franco, Salazar, Mussolini and Hitler? All were dictators of countries with precisely the same Catholic roots as England.

What kind of moron makes a claim like this?

The BBC recently succumbed to pressure from the Daily Mail to remove a TftD from the online catalogue, one in which a contributor had the temerity to call Robert the Generic Xenophobe, a xenophobe. Yet the BBC feels it’s perfectly OK to keep spewing out all manner of cerebral effluent from Tilby and friends. This is such a stupendous cock up (Tilby, not Generic) that it’s only fair to broaden our dictator hunt from the familiar local states with a religious and cultural tradition rooted in Catholicism. I feel we may learn more about the scale of Tilby’s error and perhaps even about the nature of her god.

How about we look outside Europe? The Spanish and Portuguese Catholics certainly did.

And the church, oh it was right there to help.

In 1493 Pope Alexander VI awarded colonial rights over most of the newly discovered lands of South America to the monarchs of Spain and Portugal. With Catholic roots, following Tilby’s logic, this colonial campaign would surely only have positive consequences?

In the name of Angela’s Christian god the colonisation began. There was much bloodshed and enslavement but the real killer was disease introduced by the conquistadors.

Consider for a moment the notion that the all-knowing, all-powerful Catholic god exists. What a revolting and abhorrent god it must be? Through its agent in Rome, this god sanctioned the colonisation of a continent while happy in the knowledge that the entire indigenous population would be all but wiped out by microbial imports of its missionaries.

Revolting, abhorrent and sick.

If ever you were searching for evidence that there is no all-loving and all-powerful god, surely here is a good place to start.

The populations that grew from those colonising forces from the Iberian peninsula have exactly the same Catholic roots as the English. Unlike the English, these countries did not find reason to break from Rome and have populations of Catholics today similar to those of Spain and Portugal. Of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Panama and Paraguay only Cuba doesn’t have a Catholic population to match the former colonial power. And still over 50% of Cubans claim when asked to be Catholic. So in these countries we can take comfort in Tilby’s claim that Catholic roots provided an excellent inoculation against ruling dictators.

Few of us would have any difficulty naming Hitler or Mussolini. Perhaps familiarity with Salazar and Francisco Franco is less abundant. In all cases, it’s the work of seconds to check. As it is in South America.

Paraguay, for 35 years from 1954 was ruled by the military dictator Alfredo Stroessner
Panama, for six years from 1983 was ruled by the infamous Manuel Noriega
The Dominican Republic, for 31 years from 1930 was ruled by the brutal El Jefe, Rafael Trujillo
Cuba, Fidel Alejandro Castro led as dictator from 1959 to 2008
Colombia, for four years from 1953 was ruled by military dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla
In Chile in 1973 the democratically elected government was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet. Democracy didn’t return until 1990 after decades of human rights abuses. Pinochet was assisted by the Americans who, you guessed it, have the same Catholic roots.
Brazil, also with assistance from those ever helpful yanks, endured an abusive dictatorship for 21 years from 1964 under a roster of successive dictators.
Argentina has a modern history strewn with military coups and dictatorship.

Directly counter to Tilby’s claim, Catholicism and Catholic roots appear to provide little preventive benefit when it comes to reining in the abilities of and opportunities for dictators. The church (along with the USA) actively supported two of those abusive South American revolts against democratic government. It took no more than two minutes with Google and ChatGPT to identify 12 countries that despite sharing a catholic-rooted religious culture with England, still went on to suffer at the hands of abusive dictators. If there is anything exceptional here about England, it might just be that (thus far) it has made a very fortunate escape.

Why is the buffoon Tilby on the radio?

Worse. She wasn’t done.

TILBY: Omrani quotes the tireless efforts of 18th and 19th century Evangelicals to abolish the slave trade and improve working conditions for the poor. And then there are the first English scientists with their deeply held Christian beliefs including our greatest mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. Our literary, musical and artistic traditions would never have developed the way they have without Christian inspiration.

That comment about the role of Christian inspiration is obviously true. Before that, though, Tilby claimed abolitionists and Sir Isaac Newton as standard bearers for her own religion. Here, we believe, the history ended and the propaganda began. Flag waving for faith is not unusual for presenters of TftD. Please listen to our 11 June dissection of David Walker’s enthusiastic propaganda for Anglicanism. Walker sought to mislead listeners over the contribution of Christianity to the modern ethics of war. While not as blatant as Walker, Tilby is here engaging in more of the same.

The problem with propaganda is the deliberate omission of relevant detail. As with Walker, Tilby is guilty of deceit by omission.

In Newton’s lifetime almost nobody in England thought of themselves as anything other than Christian. Moreover, they barely would have understood the concept of there being an alternative to being Christian. Academics working in the field believe that 99.6% of the population in 1800 England, considered itself to be some sort of Christian (the overwhelming majority being Anglican). There were a handful of Jews (0.3%) and less than 0.1% of the population in c. 1760 held no religion

Of course Isaac Newton was Christian. Almost everyone was, including all the scientists and mathematicians.

Unlike today.

By making a meal of the faith of our greatest mathematician in history what Tilby actually does is highlight just how rare it is today for our leading scientists to be committed Christians. There are some, but these are all the more notable because of their scarcity.

The principal difference between now and the day of Sir Isaac Newton is largely one of choice. When scientists can choose, they tend not to become committed Christians. So let’s examine the choices facing a brilliant Oxbridge academic in 1700.

Not only was there no available alternative to Christianity, the entirety of society had been inculcated, as children, generation by generation, in Christian thought and belief. The process of teaching children to believe entirely in a supernatural god, and an afterlife removes the opportunity for them to make a choice, and this removal routinely has a permanent effect.

The power of inculcation is the reason so few Muslim parents have Hindu children. You can find much more on this from Professor AC Graying’s book Against All Gods. Grayling is an Oxford Professor of philosophy. We know today that awful events in childhood can shape lives, with profoundly negative consequences. We know how important it is that children feel safe and free to ask questions. At the very least, inculcating belief in gods in children will burden them needlessly with guilt, it will distort their understanding of the world and it will force them to reject, thoughtlessly, rational ideas that conflict with their beliefs.

Grayling argues that inculcating children into religious beliefs undermines autonomy and inoculates children against critical thinking. Which, no doubt, is exactly why Christians are so keen that their children attend Sunday school. In short, it confers a resilient irrational belief from childhood that would never be possible if attempted in adults.

That resilience is also notable. As many have wryly noted, it’s not possible to reason someone out of something that they did not reason their way into.

Grayling, though, was commenting in the context of contemporary 21st century western society. Imagine how more powerful a force this inculcation would be when there were no alternative but the state-mandated religion to consider?

This ceaseless indoctrination, in England in 1700 put beyond question, even for the most talented and curious of academic minds that there was a god. And questioning the church’s teaching on that god was, much more ominously, discouraged by rule of law.

Specifically, laws passed by the government of Charles II in the 1660s. These made subscription to anything but the doctrine of the Anglican church (of which king Charles was the head) extremely, shall we say, difficult.

The circumstances of the absence of religious freedom in England arose from foreign Catholic threats and domestic civil upheaval.

So here’s something of a recap of Henry VIII, the reformation, civil war and aggressive Papist Spaniards.

Anti-Catholic sentiment gradually grew in the wake of the reformation of the church in England (its separation from the church of Rome and the genesis of Anglicanism).

This reformation was sparked by Heny VIII in 1527. Henry needed a male heir and was very keen to getting on with the necessary with Anne Boleyn. For this, though, he needed the church to permit the end of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The Pope remained unwilling to provide that permission.

Theocratic and diplomatic wheels were put in motion by Henry, largely by his appointment of Thomas Cranmer as archbishop. By 1534, Rome ceased to be a barrier to Henry’s impregnation of Boylen. The Act of Supremacy gave the reigning English monarch leadership of the church, replacing the Pope.

It was a confection of political expediency for Henry, but one that resulted in the birth of a new religion, Anglicanism, and the birth of a princess who became Queen Elizabeth I, 24 years later in 1558.

The Pope, and several sympathising Catholic countries, perhaps sensed a weakening in a country that had lost its mighty king Henry, and would now be led by a woman. The Vatican provided financial support and encouragement to Spain for overt hostility toward the English Queen. This resulted in one of the most spectacular defeats ever suffered at the hands of the English Navy. The failure of an invasion of England by Catholic Spanish forces that was intended to overthrow Elizabeth and reinstate Catholicism. The Spanish Armada was repelled. From then on, Catholicism was seen to be not just an ideological but an existential threat to the English.

The English Civil War and Oliver Cromell, then, very much fuelled this anti-Catholicism.

Cromwell, though, was of the view that Anglicanism had not pulled far enough away from Catholicism and he, upon replacing the monarchy, abolished the leadership structure of the Anglican church and banned the book of common prayer. He really wasn’t one for pulling punches.

Finally, we’re back to Charles II and Isaac Newton. 130 years after Henry, the monarchy was back on its feet with Charles as king, handling the immediate aftermath of civil war after the death of Cromwell. Charles was keen to cement the recently re-established Anglican church as the only form of Christianity in the land.

Before listing the laws Charles passed, remember that this is all in the context of what choice an academic had when it came to religion and to belief.

The Corporation Act 1661 excluded all non-Anglicans from public office and, critically for our story, prevented any non-Anglican from being awarded degrees by the universities of Oxford or Cambridge.
The Act of Uniformity 1662 obliged all clergy to use the book of common prayer, or to resign (over 2,000 did).
The Conventicle Act 1664 made illegal any non-Anglican meeting of worship of more than five people.
The Five Mile Act 1665 forbade the ejected ministers (the book of common prayer rebels) of from coming within five miles of an incorporated town, or the place of their former church. They were also forbidden to teach in schools.

Easy to see why religious freedom, a few decades later, was on the agenda of the authors of the US constitution.

Choice was something that Isaac Newton and his contemporaries at Cambridge were very much without.

Christianity was the only game in town.

The Anglicans took a ruthless approach to ensuring that theirs was the only house in which that game could be played.

You couldn’t graduate from Cambridge unless you were a practising Anglican. Such was the weft and warp of religion in the fabric of English society, a brilliant scientist couldn’t become a fellow of Newton’s Cambridge college, Trinity, unless they’d also taken Holy Orders to become a priest of the Anglican church.

Newton was under exactly this obligation following his election as fellow in 1667. Specifically, he was given seven years to become a priest or forfeit his academic life. Tilby failed to mention that Newton resisted taking these orders. Newton even sought permission from the king (the only available authority) to be exempt.

It turned out, Newton’s Christian beliefs were significantly divergent from doctrine. For example, he saw worship of Jesus as a god to be the sin of idolatry. He, also, did not believe in an immortal soul.

These views were heretical and he was careful not to announce them publicly. They apparently were so deeply held that Newton was prepared to lose his career rather than take vows which he knew he was incapable of keeping.

Fortuitously, the extraordinary royal exemption Newton sought was granted, arriving just in time to prevent the dashing of his academic career on the rocks of Anglican dogma in 1675. Similarly extraordinary, at this point, he was 26.

By modern standards, Newton was deeply committed to the Christian god. By the standards of the day, he was wildly heretical and a dangerous non-conformist.

Tilby would do well to take note that in a time when there was no choice but Anglican Christianity, Isaac Newton was firmly of the view that this church should have far less tight a grip on the advancement of science and far less stifling a guard on freedom of thought.

His work on the motion of the planets invited conjecture that the role of a divine creator of the universe was diminished. Newton, though, cautioned against seeing the universe as no more than a machine. He said, “So then gravity may put the planets into motion, but without the divine power it could never put them into such a circulating motion, as they have about the sun”.

Imagine what he’d say given what we know about the universe and its origins today? He’d certainly have to reconsider his certainty of divinely guided circular planetary motion. It seems likely that he’d be reconsidering a great deal more than that.

My plan for this podcast was to cover all the notable contributions to TftD from the week of 21 April but we’re already at the half-hour point and what I’d planned to make the thrust of this episode, Chine McDonald’s take on doubt, faith and dodgy opinion polls has yet to make an entrance.

We shall have to take on Chine McDonald’s departures from fact and reason in a future podcast. For a flavour, we’ll be drawing more on Douglas Adams. Specifically, an entry in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on a thing called the Babel fish, was originally broadcast by the BBC in 1978.

It provides the perfect prelude to any discussion of faith and doubt.

THE GUIDE: The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-boggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’

‘But,’ says Man, ‘The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’

‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

More on McDonald, faith, religion and improbable fish very soon.

For now, thank you for listening to the Second Thought podcast. For details of who we are, what we do and why, please visit secondthoughtfortheday.com.