Jacobson and Grayling at the Natural History Museum

George Jellis isn’t too impressed by Creation, but has a few tips for the Natural History Museum as well.

Howard Jacobson is quoted as maintaining that “comedy is a very important part of what I do.”

So perhaps that was what he was attempting in his presentation in the first part of The Bible: a History. (The first episode, Creation, is still available online and the series continues on Channel 4.)

As he explains in his introduction on the C4 website: “The big question for me is how to believe, and not to believe, at the same time.” He concludes at the end of the film: “The concept that something can be both true and untrue is something that religious people seem better able to grasp than athiests.”

Plenty of scope for double entendre then, one would think.

Unfortunately he actually seems to have been taking these irrationalist theses seriously.

As he says in a related article in the Daily Mail, “We need, in my view, to jettison the idea of utter truth altogether.” And further: “We are complex beings, able to believe and not believe at the same time. We do it with a TV soap opera. We accept as truth what we know not to be true, and sometimes that which is not true affects us more profoundly.”

Jacobson began the programme with an outright attack on a straw-man version of atheism, and continued such quixotic attacks to such an extent that, in common with many other commentators, I found myself almost shouting at the television. He is “moved to fury” by the ‘New Atheists’, but despite being filmed looking at one chapter title of The God Delusion, doesn’t actually seem to have read the arguments in the rest of the book. In the Daily Mail article he even refers to “fire-and-brimstone atheists” who are “closed-minded in the name of science”.

Despite A. C. Grayling’s patient explanation to the contrary, Jacobson seems to think that atheists can have no appreciation of art, music or literature.

His main thesis was that New Atheists misunderstand the nature of religion, in particular the function of the Creation myth, which seems simply to be “to stir the imagination even of unbelievers like himself”.

The impression I get from trying to understand the point of view of literary figures like Jacobson is that for them words are not for conducting logical arguments, but a form of music, in which the overtones and unstated implications or impressions or allusions, in short the art, are more important than making sense.

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The interview with Grayling was conducted at the Natural History Museum in London which Jacobson described as “a temple to Charles Darwin”, kneeling reverently on the steps beneath the great naturalist’s statue. Having paid a visit to the museum myself in the last week, for a look around the new “Cocoon” structure, I have to agree with him that it has taken on the air of a Darwinian Temple.

The statue of the man who engaged the architect and planned the building, Richard Owen, I found is now relegated to a dark corner up the stairs to the left of Darwin. The fact that he is sculpted in devilish black marble and bears a resemblance to Olivier’s version of Richard III, whereas Darwin is enthroned like a bearded sage in saintly white marble adds to the impression. OK, maybe Owen was wrong about evolution, and a bit of a sly politician, but he did get the work done by founding this magnificent building. In my view he should be reinstated in a more prominent position. The obvious place would be in the Central Hall, guiding people to the Dinosaur exhibition, which is still the most entertaining and best presented part of the museum.

He could perhaps be matched on the other side of the hall, at the entrance to the Ecology exhibition, by the statue of Joseph Banks, which is currently to be found in another dark corner up on the second floor.

My visit to the Cocoon I have to say was a disappointment. This may have been in part because no adequate explanation was given about how to operate the exhibit screens. No doubt children are taught such elementary things at school now, and pensioners like me are expected to keep up to date, but I’m finding it going too fast for me. For instance, I tried pressing the Help symbols on the touch screens and nothing ever happened.

The only access and exits from the Cocoon appear to be by lift, which is worrying to someone claustrophobic like me, and most of it consists of a single rather featureless spiral corridor.

Surely it should have been in a double helix design! Anyway, I enjoyed the Dinosaurs once again!

George Jelliss is the secretary of Hastings Humanists and has an interest in history of ideas.