Phillip Andrew Adams
From Philosopedia
Adams, Phillip Andrew (26 July 1939 - )
Adams, the son of a Congregational minister, has been a convinced atheist from the age of five. He is a popular Australian newspaper columnist who hosts ABC Radio National’s “Late Night Live.” Adams has been chairman of the Australian Film Commission, the Australian Film Institute, Film Australia, the Commission for the Future, the Victorian Council for the Arts, the National Australia Day Council, and other government and semi-government bodies. With Dick Smith and Mark Plummer, he founded Australian Sceptics. He received a Responsibility in Media Award from CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
He wrote Adams versus God, Retreat from Tolerance, and A Billion Voices, the latter about Indian politics. With Professor Paul Davies, he has discussed cosmological and quantum mechanical matters in “The Big Question,” a television series. His columns have appeared in all of Australia’s principal newspapers and journals, as well as in The New York Times, The London Times, and the Financial Times. He is the Australian representative on Index on Censorship (London) and is known for his irreverent columns in The Australian and The Bulletin. The Roman Catholic Church once announced from every pulpit in Australia that it was a sin to read any newspaper Adams wrote for, or to listen to any radio station that broadcast him. “This would have made it very difficult for the faithful,” he has observed, “given that I’ve written for every major newspaper and magazine in this country - whilst being a major broadcaster on a wide variety of commercial and public radio stations.”
Adams once declined an honorary membership in The Atheist Society of Australia. In a letter to Kevin Solway (10 Aug 1993), an atheist who complained that Adams had been soft when talking to Templeton Prize Winner and religionist Charles Birch, Adams responded:
- Given your growing concern about my credentials as an atheist, I hereby resign as a patron of your Atheist Society. God forbid that I should hang around when I'm not wanted. I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity. However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al. For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist, but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future. [Charles] Birch is, in my view, a pretentious fart whose philosophies are opportunistic and unconvincing. If people can't see that, that's their problem. In the context of a hydra-headed SBS interview, one hopes that he hoists himself on his own petard. Incidentally, if there's one thing more infuriating than a silly theologian it's an arid, doctrinaire atheist. I've had dealings with plenty of them over the years, including a famous monster from the US. To profess atheism is not to prove anything, let alone have intellectual merit. Some of the narrowest, most dogmatic and silly people I've known have been atheists—or have loudly professed themselves Humanists or Rationalists. Let the last contribution of your erstwhile patron be to warn you against intellectual arrogance. I've never believed, for a moment, that atheists have all the answers. Just that they pose better questions.
Adams lives with Patrice Newell and their child on a large bio-dynamic farm in the Hunter Valley. The two have co-authored a series of Penguin joke collections.
