We will not go quietly

I’m willing to read books by Simon Conway Morris, Ken Miller, and Francis Collins. I think they’re dead wrong on the religion issue, but they are smart guys who contribute positively to the debate in other ways. I will also read Behe and Dembski and <gack, hack> Wells; they are not smart people, and they’re wrong all across the board, but at least they’re not trying to pretend they’re my friend and are trying to help me, and I think it’s a good idea that we should know the enemy. One fellow who infuriates me, though, and whose point of view I find difficult to comprehend, is Michael Ruse (he’s pulled some weird stunts before, too). I can’t read any of his work anymore without feeling extreme exasperation.

Larry Moran explains why. Ruse is not a friend of science, not someone who wants to improve people’s understanding of the real world; instead he poses as our pal while accusing us of “evolutionism”. He pretends to be a fair and neutral broker mediating a conflict while obligingly demanding a complete surrender of anyone who advocates godlessness. He continues to promote this schism between “Chamberlain appeasers” and “Churchillian atheists” (ugh, but I detest those terms) because it suits his ends, which is to use the division to demand that the atheists sit down and STFU. That’s plainly his strategy in a recent article in the Skeptical Inquirer, which Moran rebuts.

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Nisbet and Mooney in the WaPo: snake oil for the snake oil salesmen

Nisbet and Mooney do it again, with an op-ed in the Washington Post … and I’m afraid they’ve alienated me yet further. I am convinced now that theirs is not an approach that I could find useful, even if I could puzzle out some useable strategy from it. In the very first sentence, they claim that Richard Dawkins gives “creationist adversaries a boost” — it’s the tired old argument that we must pander to religious belief. This is their rationale:

Leave aside for a moment the validity of Dawkins’s arguments against religion. The fact remains: The public cannot be expected to differentiate between his advocacy of evolution and his atheism. More than 80 percent of Americans believe in God, after all, and many fear that teaching evolution in our schools could undermine the belief system they consider the foundation of morality (and perhaps even civilization itself). Dawkins not only reinforces and validates such fears — baseless though they may be — but lends them an exclamation point.

We agree with Dawkins on evolution and admire his books, so we don’t enjoy singling him out. But he stands as a particularly stark example of scientists’ failure to explain hot-button issues, such as global warming and evolution, to a wary public.

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The two-step of terrific triviality

John Holbo has devised a wonderfully useful coinage (don’t be afraid to follow that link! It’s only two paragraphs; he’ll have to work it over for a few more weeks to expand it to Holbonian mass) that he applies to Jonah Goldberg’s intellectual evasiveness.

To put it another way, Goldberg is making a standard rhetorical move which has no accepted name, but which really needs one. I call it ‘the two-step of terrific triviality’. Say something that is ambiguous between something so strong it is absurd and so weak that it would be absurd even to mention it. When attacked, hop from foot to foot as necessary, keeping a serious expression on your face. With luck, you will be able to generate the mistaken impression that you haven’t been knocked flat, by rights. As a result, the thing that you said which was absurdly strong will appear to have some obscure grain of truth in it. Even though you have provided no reason to think so.

Hey, that sounds familiar! John Quiggin also notices its utility in the
nature-nurture debate. It’s an easy dance to elicit, too: find someone who’s trying to defend his daily prayers to a personal, loving god against a Dawkins-like assault, and you’ll see heels hammering like machine guns as they try to defend the Big Man in the Sky with philosophical abstractions and appeals to Ineffable Existence. Bring castanets and you could call it a flamenco!

Disagreeing with Wilkins

Wilkins is not happy that I jumped down Pagels’ throat for a stupid comment in an interview. He thinks I ought to take Pagels more seriously (as did some of the commenters here), and, unfortunately, also goes on to mischaracterize the uppity atheist arguments, like so:

This is what I reject about the Dawkins/Moran/PZ aggressive atheism – it takes the most stupid version of religion, argues against it, and then claims to have given reasons for not being religious. At best (and here I concur) they have given reasons not to be stupid theists. But a good argument takes on the best of the opposing view, not the worst.

Alas, as is common for criticisms of this kind, the “best” of the religious views are mentioned as a mythic monolith on a far-off mountaintop, rather than actually stated, making them rather difficult to take on. I think it’s because whenever anyone tries to state them, there’s usually a lot of hemming and hawing and admissions that they don’t actually believe in these arguments, they’re just trying to be fair and state that there are good arguments out there. It’s basically a bait-and-switch: They say, “I may believe X, but here’s Y; you can’t refute Y!” Then we pound on Y for a while, and they say, “Why are you wasting my time with arguments against Y? I believe in X!” So you pummel X for a bit, and they announce, “I may believe X, but here’s Z; you can’t refute Z!” And so it goes, endlessly. This is the theme I argued in an essay on Edge.

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So what should we ornery atheists call ourselves?

It’s not nice to annoy a fellow atheist, but once again we’ve got someone bound and determined to promote himself by dividing atheists into artificial camps and slamming the side with which he doesn’t identify. Greg Epstein, a “humanist chaplain” (whatever the hell that contradictory concatenation means), decided to disavow those horrible people like Dawkins and Harris as “fundamentalist atheists”. Outrage
ensued.

Ho-hum.

Whenever I see someone jabbering about “fundamentalist atheists”, a combination of terms that makes no sense at all and immediately reveals the speaker’s ignorance of both fundamentalism and atheism, I just write them off out of hand. It means we’re dealing with a moron. Maybe Greg Epstein has some great ideas and goals, but pffft, screw him, he’s not worth listening to. Moron.

However, the Friendly Atheist does ask a good question. We clearly have a division, with some of us being more <ahem> vigorous and uncompromising in our striving towards a consistently godless ideal, and others being a bit more laissez faire. What are we going to call those obnoxious loud-mouthed atheists who won’t sit quietly in the corner?

I have a word.

It’s “uppity.”

You can just call us those damned uppity atheists. Really, I won’t mind. I also won’t dismiss you as a moron, Uncle.

Godless, 1205: Godly, 778

We win! In a debate in London pitting Hitchens, Dawkins, and Grayling against a team of theists, Neuberger, Scruton, and Spivey, the audience voted solidly in favor of those obnoxious atheists.

I’m not sure what the consequences are, but it may mean that every Christian in England has to leave the country. Expect mobs of pious Anglicans to start washing up on beaches in Virginia and Pennsylvania any day now.