richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

332 THE GOD DELUSION
unfortunately become embroiled with a clique of Americaninspired
fundamentalist teachers, led by Nigel McQuoid, sometime
headmaster of Emmanuel and now director of a whole consortium
of Vardy schools. The level of McQuoid's scientific understanding
can be judged from his belief that the world is less than ten thousand
years old, and also from the following quotation: 'But to think
that we just evolved from a bang, that we used to be monkeys, that
seems unbelievable when you look at the complexity of the human
body ... If you tell children there is no purpose to their life - that
they are just a chemical mutation - that doesn't build self-esteem.' 144
No scientist has ever suggested that a child is a 'chemical
mutation'. The use of the phrase in such a context is illiterate nonsense,
on a par with the declarations of 'Bishop' Wayne Malcolm,
leader of the Christian Life City church in Hackney, east London,
who, according to the Guardian of 18 April 2006, 'disputes the
scientific evidence for evolution'. Malcolm's understanding of the
evidence he disputes can be gauged from his statement that 'There
is clearly an absence in the fossil record for intermediate levels of
development. If a frog turned into a monkey, shouldn't you have
lots of fronkies?'
Well, science is not Mr McQuoid's subject either, so we should,
in fairness, turn to his head of science, Stephen Layfield, instead.
On 21 September 2001, Mr Layfield gave a lecture at Emmanuel
College on 'The Teaching of Science: A Biblical Perspective'. The
text of the lecture was posted on a Christian website (www.
christian.org.uk). But you won't find it there now. The Christian
Institute removed the lecture the very day after I had called
attention to it in an article in the Daily Telegraph on 18 March
2002, where I subjected it to a critical dissection. 145 It is hard, however,
to delete something permanently from the World Wide Web.
Search engines achieve their speed partly by keeping caches of
information, and these inevitably persist for a while even after the
originals have been deleted. An alert British journalist, Andrew
Brown, the Independent's first religious affairs correspondent,
promptly located the Layfield lecture, downloaded it from the
Google cache and posted it, safe from deletion, on his own website,
http://www.darwinwars.com/lunatic/liars/layfield.html. You will
notice that the words chosen by Brown for the URL make enter-