Peter Wadhams is Professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Marine Sciences Group in the Scott Polar Research Institute.

Nailing colours to the mast

Atheist: A person who flatly refuses to worship a supreme supernatural being with power over the laws of nature. A Big Daddy God invented by priests in the Dark Ages when it was thought a red hot ball of fire went round a flat Earth every day.

As you know I follow Professor Richard Dawkins's atheistic approach to scientific endeavour. This has made Nancy Kolenda, a Christian, and the Director of The Center for Frontier Sciences, turn against me. So many "scientists" holding top positions have been brainwashed from birth to believe in Christian mythology. For example, Professor Stephen Hawking went to see the Pope! Only a believer in priestcraft would do this.

Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford University has written to say that he is not against the study of survival after death but we will have to prove it to him. I take it he means he will have to take part in repeatable experiments under laboratory conditions with a materialisation medium.

The exciting intellectual feed back from my web site tells me that very shortly I will be able to get out of the life after death industry forever. For 22 years I have been fighting to just present the secular case for survival, not to sell it. As a rational atheist I have been like a cork bobbing about in a sea of Big Daddy God merchants who are convinced that they have a hot line to the creator of the universe and that "he" is on their side! Quite frankly they have been driving me bonkers.

I have taken part in repeatable experiments where I have physically met the people who live in the invisible part of the universe. They are just as thick and stupid as when they were on Earth. I am of course being brutal just to make a very important point. We do not worship any person on Earth and it's just as important not to worship, or take too much notice of etheric people, just because they are out of range of our physical senses. Our ancestors made the terrible mistake of thinking that etheric people were angels, devils, gods or worst of all, Big Daddy God himself! They are just people, exactly the same as we are, and definitely not to be worshipped or kowtowed to.

Michael Roll

Time to Stand Up and Children must choose their own beliefs - two articles by Richard Dawkins

A First-Hand Account of Materialisation Mediumship - Michael Roll describes an experiment he attended with the materialisation medium Rita Goold. This account was written in 1983, but was not accepted for publication until 1992.