I’ve been in a few. I hate ’em. Here’s how they work: the ID proponent declares that the thesis of the debate is “Everything is Designed” and launches into his argument:

Cars are designed by intelligent agents. Shoes are designed. Computers are designed. iPhones are designed. My right hand is designed. Therefore, everything is designed.

The scientist who got suckered into this engagement begins to unlimber their long list of counter-examples. “We have natural mechanisms that generate complex forms without the need for a designer…wait, did you say your right hand is designed?”

Sure. It’s made of cells, and cells are designed, so of course it’s the product of design.

“You can’t just declare that everything you don’t understand is designed. That’s the whole point of contention here; you have to address the evidence for your position, not just announce by fiat that everything is designed.”

I’m ready to discuss all of the evidence.

“OK, I begin again. So Tiktaalik…”

Designed. Clearly designed.

“The entire fossil series illustrating tetrapod evolution…?”

Designed.

“The citrate metabolic pathway?”

Designed.

“Cells are…”

Great example. Cells are complicated, with lots of fiddly bits, therefore implying a Fiddler. Shall I throw some big numbers at you to show you how complicated cells are?

“No, that’s OK. I know how complex cells are. You don’t get to simply decide that all complex things have to be designed. Again, that’s what we’re debating! If I show you something of unknown origin, or even something with a well-documented history of natural evolutionary history, you don’t get to just greedily snatch it up and put it in the “Designed” category!”

Yes, I do. The burden of proof is on you, and I can refute everything you propose by pointing out any one thing that could have been designed, and that is sufficient to make it designed.

“By a mysterious invisible intelligence that operated for billions of years before the origin of intelligent life on Earth.”

Now you’re getting it! By the way, welcome to my proof for the existence of my God.

I bring this up because I listened to another Intelligent Design debate, this time between James Croft and the reliably ridiculous Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. It was interesting because I’d be one of those guys who brings a catalog of biological counter-examples to the debate; as a philosopher, Croft ignores all that and drills right down to the logic of the argument the creationists are making. I think that’s a smart approach, even if Meyer is only capable of a different flavor of evasion.

I’ve queued it up below at the start of James’ argument, because all the politeness and niceness in the introduction turned my stomach.

He starts by summarizing Meyer’s position:

Note: Meyer has turned that simple statement into three long-winded, tedious books now. If you can grasp that simple summary, there’s no reason to read any of his books, since they don’t provide any further evidence for his position.

Point 1 is false. Meyer exercises a kind of studied neglect of the actual state of the evidence in biology that allows him to pretend there aren’t any adequate explanations for evolutionary phenomena. Croft focuses on the link between 1 and 2, that Meyer is making an abductive argument while failing to support his primary premises. He points out three problems with the logic of Meyer’s claims which I won’t get into — watch the video. It’s not as painful as it looks: Croft begins at the 14 minute mark, and wraps up at 25 minutes, so the interesting part is only 11 minutes long. The rest is Meyer making noises with his mouth and frequently interrupting Croft, and then there’s the interminable period of the two of them telling each other how nice they are and what a worthy and interesting this conversation was. That bit was aggravating: Meyer is his usual pompous self, pretending that Croft’s annoyingly congenial, smiling manner was an affirmation that there was something of substance to his pretentious bullshit, completely oblivious to the fact that the cheerful fellow with the British accent has effectively torpedoed him below the waterline. He is unconcerned; he’s just going to sail off and write another tendentious, wordy tome repeating his 3 points over and over again.

Sheesh. You have one conversation with one of these slimy wankers, and they never let it go. I’ve been getting harangued constantly by this fanatic, Nadir, who is now sending me ultimatums.

retract your statement before it is too late

Hi PZ –
A major Islamic channel has asked me to
document your flip-flop, under the spotlight
of investigation, you answered in the negative
to the question of scientific errors in the Quran.
We have it ALL ON TAPE. Only upon knowing
about the Islamic promotion, you flip flopped.
This latest statement was NOT motivated by
the objective pursuit of science, but rather polemics.

Regarding your NEW scientific error claim:

The Quran does NOT state that embryos were poofed into existence
with bones and flesh fully formed. If you think that anyone is going to
go for this, you are sadly mistaken. This is nothing more than a dishonest
malicious and nefarious interpretation being imposed upon the text. And you will be exposed.

IF you think, there is any fool out there who will buy into this, you are mistaken.

Retract this statement by this afternoon on your blog.

Ooooh. A major Islamic channel is going to talk about me.

I did not “flip flop” on anything, nor was I under any illusions that I was not talking to a group of Islamists. It was rather obvious. They were not undercover, and were quite open about their perspective.

What he thinks is a new scientific error claim was merely recognition of their own post hoc rationalizations. One group of Muslims is telling me that there’s a clear sequential progression in development, with bones first, then muscles, and then when I point out that isn’t true, they try to tell me they’re formed at the same time, even though the text in the Quran states a sequence.

I really don’t care. It’s two fucking sentences in a holy book. Don’t try to tell me there’s some deep insight into embryology there; it’s a couple of broad guesses by people who didn’t have microscopes or any knowledge of even cell theory, so I’m going to reject any suggestion that it’s scientifically accurate.

I’m trying to pretend I didn’t.

The ol’ Firebrand Atheist is now reduced to antivaxxer/conspiracy theory apologetics.

Now that we’ve paid off our share of our legal debt, I’m getting all these questions about why we didn’t press on for Richard Carrier to pay our legal costs, or for damages, or for punishment. Let me give you the reasons all in one place.

• Just shutting down his SLAPP suit cost us a quarter million dollars and three years. Going after more would probably take another quarter million that we wouldn’t get back until the suit was over, and then only if we succeeded. The legal system is a gamble.

• Even if we did win, we’d already been through discovery, and we knew what Richard Carrier was worth: diddly-squat. He’s an itinerant classics scholar who’d been living off his wife’s income (now divorced because he’d cheated on her multiple times, so that’s gone), who had latched on to the Jesus mythicism grift to sell books and get atheist speaking gigs and to pump up his Patreon account with misogynist resentment money. He’s poor. He makes a bit more than he would if he were working for minimum wage. We’d be squeezing blood from a stone.

• What about teaching him a lesson? You know he wouldn’t. He has nothing to lose, so slapping him hard with a financial punishment wouldn’t cost him much. He doesn’t have an academic reputation, so we wouldn’t be affecting that. He does have a favorable reputation with the right-wing grievance squad, and he’s been milking that for a while now — punitive damages would make him even more of a hero to them.

• What about just shutting him up? No, that would put us on his level. Remember, the whole point of his SLAPP suit — Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation — was entirely to silence us. If he’d succeeded, a $2.1 million judgement would have shut down Freethoughtblogs, the Orbit, and Skepticon, and would have reduced the named individuals in his suit to penury (we aren’t rich, either). We’d rather deal with bad speech with more good speech, which is why an important part of the final settlement was his total capitulation and the absence of any gag order. We can talk about what an asshole Richard Carrier is all we want!

  Ironically, Carrier was supported in his suit by a lot of Free Speech Warriors.

• We just wanted it over so we could get back to our ordinary lives. Wasting a couple more years on the courts would be a distraction and deprive us of valuable time that could be better spent…chasing spiders, for instance.

• It’s enough that his own legal shenanigans have now cemented his reputation as a sex pest, rather than as a serious scholar. No legitimate academic institution is going to touch him — one quick google will label him as radioactive — and he’s going to be forever on the fringe.

It says something about my brother’s character that he marries well. His first wife, Karen, was the sweetest, kindest young woman you’d ever think to meet, and they had a long and happy marriage until she was killed by melanoma.

A few years later, lightning struck a second time, and he married Julie, a marvel and a saint, former Peace Corps volunteer, health care worker, and just general all-around joy to be with. Yesterday I met friends who’d known her for over 50 years, and were still loyal and loving her. She was active in her church, and was a critical part of the glue that held the congregation together.

She had a secret, though: bouts of severe clinical depression. It killed her earlier this year.

So I sat through a church service yesterday and listened to her friends, many if not all of them equally devout, sing her praises, entirely deserved from all I knew about her. She was someone they knew was in heaven.

All I could think was that my brother was a better person than their god, and God didn’t deserve her.

Ricky Gervais and Sam Harris have teamed up on a podcast called “Absolutely Mental”. It sounds like the title matches the content.

I transcribed Sam Harris's claim on Ricky Gervais's "Absolutely Mental" that a government official has contacted him to participate in Zoom call with CIA and ONI officials that will reveal the existence of aliens. Allegedly, they want Harris to help with "messaging." pic.twitter.com/2ypbnsaw9V

— Jason Colavito (@JasonColavito) June 7, 2021

The most delusional thing about this is not the idea that aliens have been anally probing people for decades, but that government officials would call on Sam Harris to help them out in breaking the news to the public. Yeah, right, and the head of the CIA is going to ring me up next to arrange lessons in tact.

But if you want to read some real delusional stuff, check out the Reddit thread on this podcast by the the True Believers in UAPs (“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” — they changed the name because “UFO” carries the stigma of silliness. Were you fooled?)

That tone you hear in Sam Harris’s voice…? That’s called objective acceptance.
His words perfectly illustrate the gigantic implications this reality will have on a public that might not be properly prepared to process these forthcoming facts.

When Sam starts talking about the Tic-Tac he just flat out calls it an “alien spacecraft” without any hesitation or pause. Obviously he doesn’t know what it is, but it just illustrates the incredible shift in perception of UFOs that has come around that he (and others in media of course) can say “alien spacecraft” in serious conversation without batting an eye.

Sam Harris is measured, calculated, & matter of fact on everything he says publically. I find the probability of him putting himself in an “uncomfortable position” very low. If he is talking ET…we might want to listen.

Oh god. That’s always been Harris’s schtick, stating the outrageous with a totally flat demeanor. It means nothing, but it sure hooks the gullible.

You really shouldn’t believe this stuff until you see Trey Gowdy talking about UAPs on FoxNews. There’s the gold standard of integrity. Scientific American? Pfft. What do they know?

The current crop of New Atheists take a brutal beating. Phil Torres takes the approach of looking at the atheists who get all the attention today, and asking whether they were actually good moral people who represented the ideals of atheism well.

The answer is “No.”

So if you want to read about how the atheists who rode the glory train of the atheist resurgence 10 or 15 years ago to fame and fortune now are doing, check it out and be depressed. The faces of the New Atheism are Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, David Silverman, and Steven Pinker, and if just that list is harrowing enough, wait until you read the dissections. To make it even worse, they’re all converging on the Intellectual Dark Web, which ought to be renamed the New Fascism.

What’s sad is that the New Atheist movement could have made a difference — a positive difference — in the world. Instead, it gradually merged with factions of the alt-right to become what former New York Times contributing editor Bari Weiss calls the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW), a motley crew of pseudo-intellectuals whose luminaries include Jordan Peterson, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro, in addition to those mentioned above.

Flash this image to see how fast a ‘free speech warrior’ will block you.

At the heart of this merger was the creation of a new religious movement of sorts centered around the felt loss of power among white men due to the empowerment of other people. When it was once acceptable, according to cultural norms, for men to sexually harass women with impunity, or make harmful racist and sexist comments without worrying about losing a speaking opportunity, being held accountable can feel like an injustice, even though the exact opposite is the case. Pinker, Shermer and some of the others like to preach about “moral progress,” but in fighting social justice under the misleading banner of “free speech,” they not only embolden fascists but impede further moral progress for the marginalized.

When I think back to that period when we were all giddy with the possibilities of a strong atheist movement, there are many other names that come to mind of eloquent, activist atheists who got left behind by that glory train — people who I thought were fantastic representatives of a progressive atheism. Think about Greta Christina, Mandisa Thomas, Jey McCreight, Lauren Lane, Rebecca Watson, Monette Richards, Sikivu Hutchinson, Annie Laurie Gaylor, and a few hundred others who should now be the names and faces we see on CNN whenever they go looking for a representative atheist perspective. They’re still around, but not getting the attention they deserve. Instead, Richard Dawkins is still the figurehead of atheism, with those other guys getting an occasional nod. I wonder why? Are the people on my list missing something? Or is it just their estrogen vibe?

Think back just a decade, and what happened to atheism? A massive anti-feminist backlash that hounded so many good people out of the movement and left the assholes in charge. We still feel the repercussions.

At least some studies have shown that, to quote Phil Zuckerman, secular people are “markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian” than religious people. It’s a real shame that New Atheism, now swallowed up by the IDW and the far right, turned out to be just as prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, closed-minded and authoritarian as many of the religious groups they initially deplored.

Oh, what could have been…

Oh boy, we get to relive Elevatorgate again. Thanks, Atheists for Liberty, for revisiting it.

You are a proud atheist in the emerging New Atheist movement attending one of the most impactful and energized conferences in your community. In June of 2011, you are in Dublin, Ireland, attending the World Atheist Convention, an event celebrating atheism, science advocacy, and secularism with some of the most famous freethinkers of the time.

Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. I was one of the speakers at that conference.

<Thomas Sheedy whispers, stage left: Not you.>

What?

<I wasn’t talking about you.>

Oh. OK. <sits back down>

Sheedy titled his little essay “Ten years after Elevatorgate | What we should learn from our past mistakes”, but unfortunately demonstrates that he didn’t learn much. He continues with his saga:

You enjoy the attendees and speakers so much that you stay up in conversation at the hotel bar until four in the morning. You see an attractive speaker retiring for the night, and you follow them to an elevator to ask them if they would like to join you for a cup of coffee.

Yes, I was in that hotel bar late at night, but I retired a little earlier, and no one followed me into the elevator.

<Another whisper: Not you.>

What, again? Are you saying I’m not an attractive speaker? It’s no fair. I never get addressed by my handsomeness, it’s always the women who get singled out for their appearance. I wonder if that says something about the culture…

The speaker declines. You then go to your hotel room, alone. Afterwards, the speaker that you were attracted to goes online to decry what you did. The speaker, and other extremists, denounce the New Atheist movement, a healthy and growing movement, as sexist. What you did becomes a catalyst for extremists to infiltrate and destroy the New Atheist movement.

Extremists! Destroyed! New Atheism! That speaker was Rebecca Watson, who shattered the nascent atheist movement with the four little words, “Guys, don’t do that.” So much power. Such extremism. Sheedy even quotes Rebecca’s vicious, hateful commentary, as if he is oblivious to its actual mildness.

Um, just a word to the wise here, guys, don’t do that. I don’t really know how else to explain that this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at four a.m., in a hotel elevator with you, just you. I, don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I’ve finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.

Yes. Like when commentators think it’s perfectly natural for a man to follow an “attractive speaker” into an elevator and ask them to join them in their hotel room. And for half the atheists in the world to erupt in rage at the idea that a woman might question their right to hit on them.

The idea that the New Atheist movement was systemically sexist is a blatant lie.

Sorry. It was and is systemically sexist, but for one brief moment we extremists thought it could get better, that there was hope for some introspection and growth. We were wrong.

Claims like the ones these infiltrators have made over the years only hinder our community, a community that so many of us fought to develop. If anything, these infiltrators downplayed the problems of real systemic sexism that still exists in other parts of the world, as explained by Richard Dawkins in a sarcastic response to Watson, in what became known as the “Dear Muslima letter:’’

Yeah, he then quotes the “Dear Muslima letter” and says that Dawkins was right.

Here’s the deal. Sheedy keeps talking about these “extremist infiltrators”, but they weren’t infiltrators. We were there all along. That “impactful and energized conference” featuring “the most famous freethinkers of the time”? That included people like Rebecca Watson and me. We didn’t sneak in a side door, wearing disguises. We were part of the movement, and we had helped popularize it. We also weren’t particularly extreme — suggesting that women should be just as respected as men is not a particularly radical idea.

But of course saying that there is a real systemic sexism that still exists in other parts of the world implies that there is no sexism in America or Europe. He claims that atheist circles downplayed the injustices of the Islamic world. Many of the extremist infiltrators have silenced or critiqued criticism of Islam by non-woke atheists. This is not true. That there is sexist injustice in the Islamic world does not imply that the non-Islamic world is free of them. I read somewhere, “Why do you focus on the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the beam that is in your own eye? How will you tell your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye,’ when, in fact, you have a beam in your own eye? Hypocrite!” We should be working on both the specks and the beams, you know.

Sheedy goes on, becoming increasingly ridiculous.

After their success in taking over the movement five years later,

Wait, what? Rebecca Watson took over the atheist movement? Or maybe it was me. I don’t know, he keeps snubbing me because I’m not attractive enough, but you never know — maybe I’m secretly in charge now. He keeps talking about these extremist infiltrators who have taken over, but he doesn’t name any. Is it Nick Fish, of American Atheists? Maybe Robin Blumner of CFI, who was put in charge after it merged with the Richard Dawkins foundation? Wait, Dawkins…? Could it be he’s the secret extremist mole? Not very likely.

But then he goes on to name all the types of people who’ve been thrown out of the atheist movement.

several groups of atheists, the majority of the movement’s supporters, men and women alike, were seen as pariahs at atheist conferences.

• Bill Maher type Liberals
• Secular Libertarians and Conservatives
• Ex Muslims
• Those accused of harassment without evidence
• Anyone who questioned the Atheism+ narrative (criticism was constantly conflated with harassment and ‘cyberstalking’)
• Women who disagreed with radical feminists (they were charged with ‘parroting misogynistic thought’ and ‘internalized misogyny’)

You know, all those kinds of people are still prominent in atheism. Rebecca Watson and I and many of the other people who spoke out against the casual (and sometimes not so casual) sexism and racism are out. I don’t know what he’s complaining about, since as far as I’m concerned, the assholes won. Have you looked at YouTube atheists lately? He could have been much more specific about who these pariahs are simply by listing the board of advisors for Atheists for Liberty.

• Peter Boghossian
• Melissa Chen
• James Lindsay
• Yasmine Mohammed
• Gad Saad
• Michael Shermer
• David Silverman
• Colin Wright

That’s a real rogues gallery of racists, rapists, evolutionary psychologists, and dishonest scum. It’s as if they went looking for people who should be pariahs and tried to elevate them! These are the kinds of people who still get invited to atheist conferences, you know. When was the last time you saw Rebecca Watson or me at a conference? Or on the board of advisors for an atheist group?

Who were the extremist infiltrators who conquered the atheist movement again?

Wait, before I stop, look back at the title of Sheedy’s screed, What we should learn from our past mistakes. What has he learned?

Unlike other organizations who tolerated such infiltration and subversion of the movement, Atheists for Liberty will not make the same mistake. It is because of the weakening of the movement that Atheists for Liberty exists in the first place!

Got it. So he’s going to reject tolerance, and not let feminists and egalitarians into his movement.

That’s nice.