Peter William Clement

No Need for God Peter William Clement

Because Catholic Theologians consciously fail to revise and rebuild the intellectual architecture of their faith -- and because they deliberately refuse to accommodate the discoveries of science over the 3000 years since their God was invented by a tribe of unenlightened shepherds and farmers , they are forced to maintain an inflexible policy of deliberate "obscurantism." I use arguments from science (in layman's terms)- evolutionary biology, geology, archaeology, anthropology, particle physics, astronomy, and cosmology- to demonstrate the validity of this proposition. I have been a student (and victim) of Catholic Theology for more than 65 years. Over the last seven years (since my retirement) I have devoted nearly all of my time to learning and understanding the revelations of modem science - and to recognizing how incompatible they are with the "infallible" dogmas of the Pope and his minions. I have a Ph. D. in English, and I have completed 42 years of teaching on the college level. I am now Professor emeritus of English at Elms College in Chicopee, Massachusetts. My book is devoted to the questions which all peoples have tried to answer since the dawn of civilization: "Where do we come from? Where are we going to? What are we here for? What the hell's it all about?" The findings of modem neuroscience prove- with carloads of experimental and observational data -- that, without the material substrate of the brain, there can be no consciousness: that is, there can be no soul that survives the death of the body. The correlative point is that we now have empirical proof that "God" did not magically inject a supernatural soul into a single-celled zygote at the precise moment of its conception- because there is no such entity. Catholic Theologians cannot recognize the truth empirically demonstrated by modem neuroscience -- the fact that there is no such entity as a supernatural soul. Their only recourse is to maintain a policy of inflexible obscurantism - in plainer words, a ''theology" of systematic prevarication.