When Atheists Attack (Each Other)

The squabble between Darwin lobbyists who openly hate religion and those who only quietly disdain it grows ever more personal, bitter and pathetic. On one side, evangelizing New or "Gnu" (ha ha) Atheists like Jerry Coyne and his acolytes at Why Evolution Is True. Dr. Coyne is a biologist who teaches and ostensibly researches at the University of Chicago but has a heck of a lot of free time on his hands for blogging and posting pictures of cute cats.

On the other side, so-called accommodationists like the crowd at the National Center for Science Education, who attack the New Atheists for the political offense of being rude to religious believers and supposedly messing up the alliance between religious and irreligious Darwinists.

I say "supposedly" because there's no evidence any substantial body of opinion is actually being changed on religion or evolution by anything the open haters or the quiet disdainers say. Everyone seems to seriously think they're either going to defeat religion, or merely "creationism," or both by blogging for an audience of fellow Darwinists.

Want to see what I mean? This is all pretty strictly a battle of stinkbugs in a bottle. Try to follow it without getting a headache.

Coyne recently drew excited applause from fellow biologist-atheist-blogger PZ Myers for Coyne's "open letter" (published on his blog) to the NCSE and its British equivalent, the British Centre for Science Education. In the letter, Coyne took umbrage at criticism of the New Atheists, mostly on blogs, emanating from the two accommodationist organizations. He vowed that,

We will continue to answer the misguided attacks [on the New Atheists] by people like Josh Rosenau, Roger Stanyard, and Nick Matzke so long as they keep mounting those attacks.

Like the NCSE, the BCSE seeks to pump up Darwin in the public mind without scaring religious people. This guy called Stanyard at the BCSE complains of losing a night's sleep over the nastiness of the rhetoric on Coyne's blog. Coyne in turn complained that Stanyard complained that a blog commenter complained that Nick Matzke, formerly of the NCSE, is like "vermin." Coyne also hit out at blogger Jason Rosenhouse for an "epic"-length blog post complaining of New Atheist "incivility." In the blog, Rosenhouse, who teaches math at James Madison University, wrote an update about how he had revised an insulting comment about the NCSE's Josh Rosenau that he, Rosenhouse, made in a previous version of the post.

That last bit briefly confused me. In occasionally skimming the writings of Jason Rosenhouse and Josh Rosenau in the past, I realized now I had been assuming they were the same person. They are not!

It goes on and on. In the course of his own blog post, Professor Coyne disavowed name-calling and berated Stanyard (remember him? The British guy) for "glomming onto" the Matzke-vermin insult like "white on rice, or Kwok on a Leica." What's a Kwok? Not a what but a who -- John Kwok, presumably a pseudonym, one of the most tirelessly obsessive commenters on Darwinist blog sites. Besides lashing at intelligent design, he often writes of his interest in photographic gear such as a camera by Leica. I have the impression that Kwok irritates even fellow Darwinists.

There's no need to keep all the names straight in your head. I certainly can't. I'm only taking your time, recounting just a small part of one confused exchange, to illustrate the culture of these Darwinists who write so impassionedly about religion, whether for abolishing it or befriending it. Writes Coyne in reply to Stanyard,

I'd suggest, then, that you lay off telling us what to do until you've read about our goals. The fact is that we'll always be fighting creationism until religion goes away, and when it does the fight will be over, as it is in Scandinavia.

A skeptic might suggest that turning America into Scandinavia, as far as religion goes, is an outsized goal, more like a delusion, for this group as they sit hunched over their computers shooting intemperate comments back and forth at each other all day. Or in poor Stanyard's case, all night.

There's a feverish, terrarium-like and oxygen-starved quality to this world of online Darwinists and atheists. It could only be sustained by the isolation of the Internet. They don't seem to realize that the public accepts Darwinism to the extent it does -- which is not much -- primarily because of what William James would call the sheer, simple "prestige" that the opinion grants. Arguments and evidence have little to do with it.

The prestige of Darwinism is not going to be affected by how the battle between Jerry Coyne and the NCSE turns out. New Atheist arguments are hobbled by the same isolation from what people think and feel. I have not yet read anything by any of these gentlemen or ladies, whether the open haters or the quiet disdainers, that conveys anything like a real comprehension of religious feeling or thought.

Even as they fight over the most effective way to relate to "religion," the open atheists and the accomodationists speak of an abstraction, a cartoon, that no actual religious person would recognize. No one is going to be persuaded if he doesn't already wish to be persuaded for other personal reasons. No faith is under threat from the likes of Jerry Coyne.

I suspect your correspondents get atwitter over coordinate transformations in the hope of pressing equivalencies. For instance, the ancients were able to navigate the oceans even though they thought the sun orbited the earth.

But our correspondents in these debates often fail to state what the system "is" for their arguments.

If the "system" is the solar system then geocentric solutions will not help you navigate. And if the "system" is the Milky Way, you'll need Relativity to get around.

We see this equivalency argument quite often in the crevo debate usually between math and science terms. Words and concepts have specific meaning in mathematics which do not always translate well to physical "systems."

The classic case-in-point is "randomness." Numbers extracted from an extension of pi may appear random when they clearly are not, they are determined by calculating the ratio of the circumference to the diameter.

You can't say something is random in the system when you don't know what the system "is."

When our correspondents use the term "random" in science disciplines they actually mean "unpredictable" because the "system" - the full number and types of dimensions - is both unknown and unknowable.

But for the atheist correspondent "randomness" is one of his favorite arguments against God the Creator. "Unpredictable" does not help him since it only indicates that there are things he does not and cannot know.

Infinity is another useful math term which doesn't translate well to science simply because space/time is finite - it doesn't pre-exist but is created as the universe expands.

Another example is the term "information." Information Theory is a branch of Mathematics and the term strictly means the reduction of certainty (Shannon entropy) in the receiver as it moves from a before state to an after state. It is not the message but the communication of it.

Physicists however use the term "information" to mean properties of objects in physical systems. To the mathematician that's the message, the information content - it ignores the model altogether and all the insight it offers (Shannon, Rosen, et al)

It seems to me the most common tactic used by the anti-God anti-Christ correspondent is to get the other person to accept his definitions in the debate. It usually begins with minor issues and then builds.

Very typically, he'll define the word "creationism" to mean Young Earth Creationism and then spend the rest of the debate arguing against that strawman completely ignoring the various Christian understandings concerning Scripture.

Lately, when the well meaning Christian correspondent gives an inch, he takes a mile by defining "belief" and "knowledge" as mutually exclusive.

From there he upholds "knowledge" as reliable and certain and shuffles all spiritual matters into the belief column whereupon he then equates all beliefs as equally valid, e.g. if a person believes in God he may just as well believe in pink unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters.

Bottom line, we should not allow the atheist to control the dictionary or the rules of engagement.

Atheists are still operating in the Dark Ages in mental reasoning and knowledge of science

Do you believe the Sun stood still for 24 hours when Joshua wrote about it as a factual event?

Do you believe the mustard seed is the smallest seed in the world because allegedly Jesus (erroneously) said it is?

You "It’s merely a red herring, just like all the other atheistic deflection techniques, to draw attention from their abysmal knowledge of science" yet all of you believe the abysmal science of the Bible is true.

The believers here and elsewhere are good at spinning...and as for ID, it is pseudoscience, it has no academic recognition, despite the posturing of the like of you. I have yet to see something scientific come out of your posts.

There’s something about the denial of God that obviously fries the brain and causes one to become foolish, because every single atheist we’ve debated on FR about science shows the same defective mental abilities

Defective mental abilities? If you believe with all your heart that you are Maria Antoinette, and I express doubt, you will call me a fool or a liar (or maybe both). Does that really make me a fool or a liar? Or does it prove that you are Maria Antoinette?

Why are you playing dumb? Or you just like to spin? From earth, we see a horizon and this is our reference. As the earth turns form west to east the celestial objects seem to "move" in the opposite direction.

When we look at the Sun, we see an image that is 8.3 minutes old. If the light from the sun reached us instantaneously, then the image of the sun we see would correspond to its true position relative to the horizon. Since the light doesn't reach us instantaneously, the apparent (ghost) image of the Sun and its true position relative to our horizon are not the same.

You know that. You are just being tyring to be juvenile. And I am not promoting or declaring geocentricity but simply stating how we, being on earth, perceive things. The Sun "moved" relative to us in the rihgt acsention. But in relaity we moved (along the path of Earth's rotation). Wedon;t fele, the movmements, so it looks like the wolrd is moving and we are not. It's not how things are (big picutre), but it's how it appears from our perspective.

You can photograph the "rising" Sun, or star trails. They are real from our perspective, relative to our fixed reference, the horizon. End of story. Quit this imbecilic petty nonsense and return to the topic of the thread.

"Since the light doesn't reach us instantaneously, the apparent (ghost) image of the Sun and its true position relative to our horizon are not the same."

kosta50 and LeGrande are correct about the instantaneous field effects of gravity and that the 'true' position of the sun is ahead of the apparent position because of c.

"And I am not promoting or declaring geocentricity but simply stating how we, being on earth, perceive things."

There would be nothing technically wrong with your argument if you were declaring geocentricity. Geocentrism and acentrism are equivalent coordinate-systems under GR and equivalent CS are physically indistinguishable.

“Can we formulate physical laws so that they are valid for all CS [coordinate systems], not only those moving uniformly, but also those moving quite arbitrarily, relative to each other? […] The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS could be used with equal justification. The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the sun moves and the earth is at rest” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS.”

Einstein, A. and Infeld, L. (1938) The Evolution of Physics, p.212 (p.248 in original 1938 ed.);

“The relation of the two pictures [geocentricity and heliocentricity] is reduced to a mere coordinate transformation and it is the main tenet of the Einstein theory that any two ways of looking at the world which are related to each other by a coordinate transformation are entirely equivalent from a physical point of view.... Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is ‘right’ and the Ptolemaic theory ‘wrong’ in any meaningful physical sense.”

Hoyle, Fred. Nicolaus Copernicus. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1973.

"...Thus we may return to Ptolemy's point of view of a 'motionless earth'...One has to show that the transformed metric can be regarded as produced according to Einstein's field equations, by distant rotating masses. This has been done by Thirring. He calculated a field due to a rotating, hollow, thick-walled sphere and proved that inside the cavity it behaved as though there were centrifugal and other inertial forces usually attributed to absolute space. Thus from Einstein's point of view, Ptolemy and Corpenicus are equally right."

Born, Max. "Einstein's Theory of Relativity",Dover Publications,1962, pgs 344 & 345:

"People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations,” Ellis argues. “For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations.” Ellis has published a paper on this. “You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”

Ellis, George, in Scientific American, "Thinking Globally, Acting Universally", October 1995

I like your adding the beach ball and your observations would be correct with the beach ball as the reference point. With a fixed beach ball your observer could tell whether he was spinning or the sun was orbiting him.

I am beginning to believe that this is more a relative reference problem.

Instead of fixing the beach ball as the reference point, lets give it the option of orbiting around the observer. Now we have a lot more variables. It is possible to only have the beach ball in motion around the observer. That would be like our moon. If the beach ball and sun orbit our observer at the same rate how can our observer tell whether he is spinning or if the beach ball with the sun behind it are orbiting him? Or it can be some combination of all of the above. It can even be that our observer is spinning and orbiting the sun while the beach ball is orbiting the observer. Almost any combination is possible.

Religion as our earliest science, made the observation that the Earth was fixed and that everything revolved around the Earth and Religion had a lot of evidence to back its theory up. There was nothing to contradict that theory. Even odd lights that didn’t quite move the way they were supposed to, obeyed the theory within a very tiny margin. Everything could be shown to be orbiting the Earth, with very good evidence. This was proof of the divinity of the Bible.

Except for a couple of nutcases, heretics actually, this theory was unchallenged until Galileo built a telescope and saw Moons orbiting Jupiter. But that wasn’t the real shocker, people using telescopes could see which part of the planets and the moons were lit up and determine their relationship to the Sun.

Thus it was determined that the planets, with their moons orbiting them, orbited the Sun. The interesting thing though is that this dawning understanding took hundreds of years, because the Churches Earth centric models were actually better at predicting celestial events.

Now we know that there is no fixed point, everything is in motion. There isn’t even a fixed time, there is no universal now. Everything, distance, order of events, mass, energy, etc. are variables.

This is probably the proof that an unchanging God can’t exist.

"We know geocentrism is not the "big picture" model, but from earth it really doesn't matter."

This is a common misconception. Geocentrism is the 'big picture' model because the gravitational effects of the entire universe must be considered. Acentrism is the 'small picture' model because it ignores the gravitational effects of the rest of the universe.

"So, when we look at the sky, the sky appears to be be moving relative to us. We don't feel the earth's rotation and feel motionless, so the "outside" is moving, sort of like on the ship when seen through a porthole in steady waters."

We cannot distinguish between the earth's rotation and a universe that is spinning around a stationary earth. The effects are the same. We also cannot measure any orbital movement of the earth. This is all assumed.

"Pictures prove what we see, illusion as it may be, it is verifiable and real form where we stand"

No, pictures do not prove what you assume to be true. As the quotes I posted clearly stated, there are no physically-observable differences between a geocentric and an acentric model under GR. GR was developed to reconcile the belief that we are moving through space with the lack of evidence thereof (Michelson-Morely & Airey's Failure).

Now, you have 2 choices. You can continue to assume that the earth is moving in the absence of evidence thereof, or you can be a geocentrist. This is a philosophical choice, however. Under GR both are equally acceptable and physically indistinguishable.

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