This is an excerpt of a recent address delivered at the Free Library of Philadelphia in America by eminent scientist Richard Dawkins speaking about his reasons for being, as you’ll hear, a ‘tooth fairy agnostic.’ He gets this part pretty well right. Christianity claims to be a monotheistic religion, but you have to wonder sometimes. Rivers of medieval ink, not to mention blood, have been squandered over the mystery of the Trinity and in suppressing deviations such as the Arian heresy. Arius of Alexandria in the 4th century AD, denied that Jesus was con-substantial, ie of the same substance or essence, with God. What on earth could that possibly mean? you’re probably asking. Substance, what substance? What exactly do you mean by essence? Very little, seems the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century and the Emperor Constantine ordered that all copies of Arius’ book should be burned. Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs, such has ever been the way of theology. Do we have one God in three parts, or three gods in one? The Catholic Encyclopaedia clears up the matter for us in a masterpiece of theological close reasoning. ‘In the unity of the godhead there are three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; these three persons being truly distinct, one from another. Thus in the words of the Athanasian Creed, the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three gods but one god …
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