Be informed

It is time for me to have another gripe at the BBC’s Thought for the Day. Naturally the contributors are now turning their attention to Japan and how a benevolent God could allow the combination of earthquake and tsunami to happen (the nuclear emergency could conceiveably be put at our own door as humanity). The Catholic commentator, Catherine Pepinster (pictured, left), started the ball rolling on Saturday (12 March) with the following explanation: “For all the sudden eruptions of nature, God plays by the rules. Creation includes the thermodynamics that lead to earthquakes and tsunamis, but the same laws of chemistry and physics allow us to have brains capable of understanding those thermodynamics. There’s a consistency about the universe that means we can learn about the kind of world we inhabit in all its complexity.”Then yesterday (Tuesday) the extraordinary Professor David Wilkinson (pictured right), an astrophysicist, offered the following: “Yet underneath, is the search for a coherent long-term narrative, which understands the natural world and science as both good and risky. As a Christian I find such a narrative in the conviction that this world is the creation of a good God, who risks giving freedom to human beings and the natural world. Today the people of Japan will take inspiration from their own history of rebuilding a nation in the face of devastation. For those who are inspired by a God who walks the pages of human history in Jesus to demonstrate the prioritize compassionate action towards all those in need, the challenge to stand with them is clear.”

Decoding these rather insensitive bits of prose is not my task now. But the BBC’s continued concession to these people to have free rein to spout this nonsense gets increasingly intolerable.