Godly geologists
Sir: Bruce Anderson’s article in your Christmas special (‘Confession of an atheist’, 18/25 December) was a great example of the thoughtful and reasonable atheism of which we have been starved over recent years.
That said, he still makes one howling and oft-repeated error when he claims that Christianity never recovered ‘from the loss of medieval cosmology and the emergence of modern geology’.
The idea that it was science that was somehow responsible for the waning of Western religion is a relatively recent one, its origins lying in a number of popular but egregious histories of the two disciplines published in the late 19th century. It is badly wide of the mark.
The scientific revolution has its origins in narrowly Christian convictions. The founders of the Royal Society were deeply devout men, spurred on in their work by the presuppositions that creation was ordered, rational and comprehensible, and that by studying it they would better understand and glorify God.
Similarly, the first geologists (in Britain at least) were clergyman (William Buckland) or devout (Charles Lyell). Adam Sedgwick (another reverend geologist) spoke for many when he wrote in his unpublished autobiography, ‘I am thankful that I have spent so much of my life in direct communion with nature, which is the reflection of the power, wisdom, and goodness of God.’ Geology may have unsettled some but it secularised very few.
The reasons for the decline of Christianity in the West are as numerous as they are complex but they have surprisingly little to do with science.
Nick Spencer
Research Director, Theos, London SW1
Islam’s Rembrandts
Sir: Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 11 December) is misleading on two fronts. ‘Because of Islam’s prohibition of the depiction of the human face,’ he says, ‘Muslim countries have not had their Rembrandts or their Caravaggios.’
The former is a widely held misconception; in fact, the human form is found in Egyptian and Persian ceramics as early as the 11th or 12th century and in the later arts, whether on Iznik pottery from Turkey, Safavid textiles from Persia or manuscript decoration from Mughal India.
Secondly, has he not considered for a moment the arts of the book, when from the 15th to the 19th century Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal rulers patronised generations of miniature painters, many of them masters of their genre?
The Windsor Castle Padshahnama, the magnificent manuscript made in the mid-17th century for Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, and presented to George III, lists 14 artists, a number of whom not only painted accurate likenesses of their ruler but also included self-portraits of themselves.
Brendan Lynch
London SW1
A prince in the gun turret
Sir: In case no former naval person mentions it, Jane Ridley is wrong to say that the future King George VI was invalided out of the Royal Navy during the Great War and ‘so he saw no real action’ (Books, 11 December) .
On the contrary, Prince Albert (as he was) returned from convalescence in May 1916 to serve as a midshipman, acting sub-lieutenant, in HMS Collingwood, and was in one of her gun turrets at the battle of Jutland, decidedly the most ‘real action’ the Navy fought during the war.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Mürren, Canton Bern, Switzerland
Who broke Wedgwood?
Sir: There are corrections that need to be made to A.N. Wilson’s comments about Wedgwood and the Wedgwood Museum (Diary, 27 November). Sir Arthur Bryan became managing director of Wedgwood in 1963. When the company went public in 1967 the annual turnover was £4 million; by 1987, when the hostile bid was made by London International, the turnover had increased to £223 million and the company was one of the largest and most profitable potteries in the world. Bryan had overseen this expansion, so it’s curious for Wilson to single him out as the man ‘who did more than any other single individual to wreck the ceramic industry’. He did not persuade the Wedgwood family to go public. It suited the family to make this move as it made their shares tradable, and within a short time, most of the family’s shares had been sold. Bryan did not feel comfortable with Wedgwood becoming a subsidiary of a condom manufacturer, and a deal was made with Waterford. It was the Waterford Wedgwood management that led the company into bankruptcy in 2009.
The Wedgwood Museum’s magnificent collection was put into a charitable trust in 1964, so it ceased to be an asset of the company. Had Bryan not done this, the collection would have been sold years ago. I have been involved in the campaign to save the museum. Their website, www.savewedgwood.org, explains how the pension deficit arose through legislation introduced in 2005 and 2008, and therefore cannot be blamed on Bryan.
Finally, there are two cities in China, Changsha and Tangshan, which each produce more pottery than Stoke-on-Trent.
Queensberry, London W9
Barking up the wrong tree
Sir: I claim the Oliver Rackham prize for spotting that the fine tree being sawn in the photo accompanying his excellent article (‘Leaves on the line’, 18/25 December) is not an elm, but a London plane. Given the unfamiliarity of elm bark these days, the mistake is, perhaps, forgivable.
Joss Wynne Evans
Loch Ness Clay Works, Drumnadrochit
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