The title of the last chapter of my book, False Promises (2012, available from Freedom Publishing Books), was taken from Yeats’ poem The Second Coming. It reads: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” The study traced Australian government policy and social statistics for the entire…
An atheist once challenged me to give an example of a verifiable miracle in the real world. My reply was: “You’re standing in one.” The improbability of a technological civilisation is only the tip of a pyramid of improbabilities so extreme that they may be called miracles. As our knowledge of the formation of the universe increases, the more improbable does it seem that stars and planets, and elements such as carbon, could have formed at all. Extremely small variations in gravity and other forces would have made their formation impossible. If the Big Bang itself had been either a…
Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time has an impressive history. Messiaen was captured by the German army in June 1940 and incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp in Gorlitz, now part of Poland. Fellow prisoners were clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire and cellist Etienne Pasquier. He managed to get some paper and a pencil from a sympathetic guard and wrote a trio, which was then expanded into a quartet, with Messiaen playing the piano. The quartet was premiered at the camp, outdoors and in the rain, in 1941. The instruments were poor, but Messiaen said his music…
Towards the end of August, The New Atlantis, a respected journal of science and ethics, published the report, “Sexuality and Gender”. The 143-page report examines some 200 peer-reviewed studies on sexual orientation and gender identity and concludes that science has by no means provided any substantive foundation for many of the assertions that are…
