Arc Tangent

The Right Rev­erend Pro­fes­sor Tom Frame responded to my email — and quite a nice response it was. He’s given me per­mis­sion to pub­lish it here. A big thank-​you to him for engaging!

Dear Andy (if I might be informal)

Thanks for tak­ing the trou­ble to write to me after a busy day.

It might help you to know that I didn’t pro­duce the “extract” that appeared in today’s SMH. It was put together by the pub­lish­ers (UNSW Press) and the edi­tor of the Op Ed page. In fact, I wasn’t aware that it was appear­ing this week until I began to receive email this morn­ing. As most of the email has been abu­sive and com­bat­ive, your care­fully con­sid­ered email was a pleas­ant change.

The sen­tences to which you refer do not appear in that order in the book, they are from two sep­a­rate chap­ters and were merged to give an impres­sion you won’t find in the book. I am pleased that you intend to acquire a copy (which is some 110,000 words in length) and exam­ine the argu­ments that I present in the depth and in the order that I present them. It is nei­ther anti-​Darwin nor anti-​evolutionary theory.

There is one mat­ter I want to touch on here. In a forth­com­ing book on unbe­lief in Aus­tralia (it will appear in Nov 09) I have iden­ti­fied and dif­fer­en­ti­ated the two com­mon strains of athe­ism in Aus­tralia: pos­i­tive
athe­ism and neg­a­tive athe­ism. Pos­i­tive athe­ism con­tends that God does not exist whereas a neg­a­tive athe­ist is some­one with­out a belief in God. You are plainly a neg­a­tive athe­ism whereas many of the peo­ple who have emailed me today are pos­i­tive athe­ists. It is dif­fi­cult to have a con­ver­sa­tion with a pos­i­tive athe­ist and, these days, I don’t even try.

I hope you find the book use­ful. It is, in essence, an account of the influ­ence of evo­lu­tion­ary the­ory on Aus­tralian think­ing and pop­u­lar cul­ture. What appeared in today’s news­pa­per was not an accu­rate reflec­tion of its objec­tive. I would be inter­ested in your thoughts after read­ing the narrative.

Tom