Thought for the day

In two and a half minutes some people can argue convincingly and fluently.

Today's Today Programme Thought for the day on Radio 4 was Anne Atkins. She argues theology controversially. She starts from the recently discovered Shakespeare play, discusses how the script has moved on from what it was to modern literature criticism. Lit crit can't improve with time, so she asks:

Who's going to know more about a playwright, scholarly editors 400 years later or contemporary actors who shared a play with him?

Theology can suffer a similar lag of logic on the lines of 'They believed that sort of thing in those days' and Atkins reminds of gospel stories, as if a fisherman couldn't tell without the second law of thermodynamics that you can't walk on water or that Lazarus sister didn't know you can't raise a man that's been four days dead and lies in his tomb. Yet she and her community saw Lazarus walk out alive.

Members of the jury do you want in your witness box an eminent man of letters with a sophisticated intellectual theory of how the crime could have been committed
or the eye witness who saw it happen?