That recent atheists-hate-ken-miller piece had more words from Jerry Coyne than from me — and his situation was just like mine, saying mostly laudatory things about Miller, only to have our criticisms used to paint a false picture of the beleaguered Dr Miller.
The story did Miller no favors, either. His ludicrous argument about amputees is going to get wide circulation every time we feel in the mood to deflate theistic evolutionists.
Which is all the freakin’ time.
It certainly isn’t the Netherlands.
This isn’t news any more. News would be an official Catholic organization that wasn’t a front for repressed perverts and apologists for child abuse.
I noticed people were getting a little anxious for the latest Molly award, but I usually try to hold off to a weekend. It’s worth waiting a few days, right? Anyway, the Molly for January 2010 goes to Paul W. You’re all expected to follow his example and write treatises in the comments from now on.
Now you have to get to work and leave votes for the February Molly in the comments here.
A young child at a Boulder pre-school has been kicked out for an awful crime. The child was enrolled in a Catholic preschool, and also has two mommies. I’ll leave you to guess which of those two is the awful crime.
According to teachers at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School, a meeting was held Tuesday to discuss the issue. The staff was told a student would not be allowed to re-enroll because of his or her parents’ sexual orientation. The staff members were also told not to talk to the media.
Another interesting twist is that the staff at the school are described as “disgusted” with the decision; it came from on high, straight from the priests at the archdiocese. It’s a case of the more secular staff knowing what the decent thing they ought to be doing is, and the religious buffoons using their holy dogma to do evil.
Back when we bought our house, one of the things that we liked about it is that it’s a somewhat quirky place, with an odd layout and a few old 50s touches. One thing I didn’t care for is the decor of the upstairs; it’s got this vivid scarlet carpeting everywhere, and one of the bedrooms was (it’s been repainted now) wallpapered with bright green shamrocks. I joked that we could open a brothel for leprechauns up there if we wanted to make a little extra money.
You know, if I’d been moving into the Vatican, instead, I’d probably have made a similar joke — all that garish, gaudy excess and all the men wondering around in flamboyant dress would have probably moved me to joke that we could open a brothel for gay priests here.
What do you know, it’s true. There is a gay prostitution scandal in the Vatican right now. I am in awe. On top of the child abuse scandals in Ireland and Germany, this is just icing on top of a rotten, wormy, corrupt cake.
And this afternoon, I’m going to have to sweep the upstairs bedroom for any sneaky leprechauns.
The other day, I got a request for an interview: a reporter was writing a story about Ken Miller. I was happy to do so — this was clearly going to be a friendly piece about Miller, and I thought it was good that he get some more press. I talked on the phone with this fellow for 20 minutes or so, and I told him what I thought: Miller is a smart guy, a great speaker, a hardworking asset to the people opposing creationism, and I also said that his efforts to squeeze religion into science were ill-founded and badly argued. I said, “It’s an effort to reconcile a legitimate discipline with foolishness.”
Guess what the only quote to make it into the article was?
Yeah, it turned out to be a crappy atheist-bashing article. It wasn’t enough to talk about Miller’s good work and the respect he gets from others — no, it had to be turned into a fight, with poor Miller unable to win because he’s being “attacked by Darwin-hating fundies and leftie atheists alike,” and the New Atheists are the primary villains of the piece. The more complex story I tried to tell got discarded, and only one short sentence made it to the final result. I must have been a major disappointment to the reporter, since I didn’t give him much in the way of vicious attack-dog quotes.
He also got a little bit from Jerry Coyne. Again, it’s clear but temperate stuff. The story really does not have anything to justify the claim that we’re out to get Miller, or that the New Atheists are somehow in symbiosis with fundagelical loons.
“By discussing science and religion together and asserting that science more or less points you to evidence for God, he blurs the boundaries between science and faith,” says Coyne, “boundaries which I think have to be absolutely maintained if we’re going to have a rational country and we’re going to judge things based on evidence rather than superstition.”
I agree completely with that — Miller does blur the lines in very silly ways. The article even reiterates Miller’s notorious explanation from his book, Finding Darwin’s God, and obliviously confirms Coyne’s point by approvingly citing the way Miller mingles nonsense with science.
But the cell biologist also makes explicitly scientific arguments: maintaining, for instance, that quantum indeterminacy — the ultimately unpredictable outcome of physical events — could allow God to intervene in subtle, undetectable ways.
This sort of sly intervention, he argues, is vital to the Creator’s project: if God were to re-grow limbs for amputees, for instance — if God were to perform the sort of miracles demanded by atheists as proof of his existence — the consequences would be disastrous.
“Suppose that it was common knowledge that if you were a righteous person and of great faith and prayed deeply, all of a sudden, your limb would grow back,” he says. “That would reduce God to a kind of supranatural force . . . and by pushing the button labeled ‘prayer,’ you could accomplish anything you wanted. What would that do to moral independence?”
That is not a scientific argument in any way—I guess the reporter was fooled by the flinging about of “quantum”. All that is is tired old post hoc theological apologetics without a hint of evidence to back it up.
Nowhere anywhere in the article is any reasonable support for the notion of a god, nor especially of any peculiarly Catholic deity. Of course there isn’t, because he doesn’t have any.
What he does do, again, is try to throw atheists under the bus. It’s more bullshit about how science has to compromise with the public’s version of spiritual superstition, rather than remaining true to the evidence.
But Miller rejects any suggestion that the science in his work suffers when he brings in the spiritual. And he argues that the New Atheists, in their forceful rejection of God, are doing damage, in their own right, to a scientific brand already under assault.
…
Indeed, Miller argues that the creationists and New Atheists are in an odd sort of symbiosis — reinforcing each others’ extreme views of the incompatibility of science and religion.
Well, fuck that noise.
The New Atheists are as much a force in opposition to creationism as is Ken Miller; more so, I would argue, because we don’t make fuzzy, muddled compromises with absurd medieval humbug. Even if he disagrees on that last point, his constant efforts to belittle the atheists on his side in this struggle, to repeatedly argue that they are a detriment to science education, is getting tiresome. Miller wants to turn the pro-evolution movement into a stalking horse for Catholicism, while his godless colleagues have repeatedly stated that we want no endorsement of religion or atheism in science education. The only one doing damage to the “brand of science” is the guy with pitiful idea that god is noodling about at the quantum level in ways that are completely undetectable — he wants to claim that he has an invisible dragon in his garage, and what’s more, that that claim is scientific.
Remind me, next time I’m asked about Ken Miller, that I shouldn’t bother to say anything appreciative. It will be ignored and won’t be reciprocated. And I’m not going to endorse his crusade to taint science with supernaturalism.
Kentuckians havesomething to live down right now, Ken Ham and his Cretin “Museum”. But look back to your noble past: read some of the words of Charles Chilton Moore, a godless newspaperman from Lexington who was as bold as any today.
Fifteen hundred years ago, Constantine, who murdered his own wife and children, started the Christian religion.
From that day to this that religion has been the greatest curse that ever afflicted the earth.
This religion teaches that 6,000 years ago God made the first man out of dust – not even mud – and the first woman out of a bone; that God cursed the whole human race because a snake made the woman eat an apple; that God had a son by another man’s wife, and that he had this son murdered in order to keep himself from sending all the human race to hell.
This son taught that any man who did not believe that piece of ignorance and priestly lying would go to hell and burn eternally in fire and brimstone.
The Bible, in which these things are taught, favors drunkenness, murder, slavery, lying, stealing and lechery.
He published that in 1900. Fiery bunch, those Southern newspapermen — I am reminded, for some reason, of Twain’s Journalism in Tennessee.
It seems the latest topic in the immortal thread is underwear, so here you go, more underwear. The ladies and the gay men may enjoy this video, the rest of us…well, smile and buck up over your temporary objectification.
Next week, we’ve got the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Australia (with a side event, the Freethought University Alliance meeting, just for students). At the end of the month, it’s the Northwest Freethought Converence in Renton, Washington. If none of those are close enough for you, here’s another: the Atheist Alliance International is meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark (nice lineup, too).
Come on. There’s got to be room in your schedule for a godless vacation somewhere. There are probably other meetings going on, too — they seem to be popping up like mushrooms.
