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.

Man is the measure of all things, but man has no fixed nature. Man measures all things by his words, but words have no fixed meanings. Language is not an instrument for finding truth, but for changing it. Those who can master it, master all. It is a good creed for rogues, and commends itself to tyrants in every age.

"Language is not an instrument for finding truth, but for changing it." Exactly. The trick is to find the magic word — the Zauberwort— that can conjure a new, preferred "dream world" and propel it into existence.

Voegelin elaborates, quoting Nietzsche:

"The charm (Zauber) that works for us, the Venus eye that fascinates even our foes and blinds them, is the magic of the extreme ... the seductive force that radiates from all that is utmost...." In the same aphorism he permits his psychological acumen to reveal an even deeper stratum in the magician's consciousness, when he denies the relevance of truth as the source of the charm. Truth there may be in his vision, he continues, "but we don't need it, we would come to power and victory even without truth." The power of the extreme does not derive from an ulterior source; it is contained within itself. The magician's extreme is the causa sui of reality, disposing roundly of the First Reality in which we live, victoriously establishing the second reality as it breaks forth from a beyond of truth. I do not know of any other thinker who has traced the magician's dream so unequivocally to its origin in the activist's passion for transforming the truth of divinely created order into the terror of humanly created nontruth, if not antitruth.... Speech is the powerful thing, the dynastes megas, that can form or deform the order of man and his actions....

Certainly our sitting president is onto this. He is a "sorcerer" who thinks he can conjure a new reality by means of rhetoric alone. It's entirely a matter of "listen to what I say, do not spend your time on what I actually do. What I say is "true," regardless of how it plays out in actual reality."

No wonder Washington is such an insane asylum nowadays!

Thank you ever so much, dear spirited irish, for your outstanding essay/post!

No, faith does not equal knowledge. You may know(or be informed) and not have faith

But knowledge is absolutely necessary to have faith, right? Are you saying one can believe in complete ignorance? What does one believe in without knowledge?

In other words, you must know first and foremost what God is, and then which one of many gods we know of is the "true God" in order to believe in him. For some bushmen to believe, then, they first must hear about him (from fallible men "on a mission from God", and believe them).

But before they can believe them they must be able to "hear" and discern the truth, and for that they need special (spiritual) "ears" which only God gives to some (or so at least Christian scriptures say).

If you can't hear something, you can't know about it, let alone "understand" it!? But if you don't hear you can't know the truth and therefore can't believe!

Seems like faith is entirely based on knowledge, AC, a very Gnostic type of knowledge, reserved for some by divine will, I am told. The rest are, well, forced to live with their handicap...like telling a handicapped person whose wheelchair won't fit into an elevator "tough; take the stairs, loser!"

Spirited: Solipsism does not “get in the way” of egotism and elitism. Solipsism IS egotism and elitism.

kosta: Read it again, SI. I said that admitting to it gets in the way of egotism and elitism. Intellectual honesty always does.

Point and counterpoint!

Regarding what spirited irish wrote, I'd say she's exactly right: Solipsism is the form that egotism and elitism express. The idea of "man is the measure" involves a circularity that always throws man back on himself, as the self-purported criterion of "truth."

But if a man is disordered, alienated from reality and loathes the human condition, then how can he be a criterion of truth? Last time I checked, truth has something to do with what is actually going on in the world, independent of human wishes and desires.

Regarding what kosta50 wrote, I'd say I noticed a certain odor of self-congratulation on grounds of his self-proclaimed "intellectual honesty." So, does that make spirited irish — or betty boop — chopped liver in kosta's book?

No, of course not! In kosta's book, we are simply delusional — because we "believe" in things we cannot "prove." Which shows that we are incapable of rational analysis. Thus we are, by his definition, "intellectually dishonest."

But kosta talks ad nauseam about intellectual honesty, without giving us a clue as to how such a thing is to be measured. If I were to take kosta as "the measure," I'd be hard put to understand anything at all; for he stands on shifting sands of passion.

Plus I wonder: If one were suddenly to become totally blind, would that mean that one is thereafter incapable of knowing anything at all? Kosta seems to suggest that if it ain't a direct observable — i.e., something capable of detection by the sense of sight — then it simply ain't: If we do not have direct observables, then reliable knowledge in unattainable.

Kosta says he is not denying the "existence" of God. It's just he refuses to believe in Him until or unless God "proves" himself to kosta in a way acceptable to kosta. Which, since I strongly doubt that will ever happen, leaves kosta in the posture of (1) not expressly denying God; while at the same time (2) his method obviates the "existence" of God in the first place. Bottom line, his effective rejection of God is implicit in his "intellectual method." Yet due to (1) above, he can claim all innocence of atheism....

Jeepers, to follow kosta, it helps to have some experience with Orwellian-speak, or with Kafka's nightmares....

But I only have so much time and energy to follow along....

Thanks to all participants on this thorny yet fascinating thread!

betty remarked: “Kosta says he is not denying the “existence” of God. It’s just he refuses to believe in Him until or unless God “proves” himself to kosta in a way acceptable to kosta.”

Spirited: The Triune God is Spirit. So too is mind. Though Jesus Christ often uses soul and spirit interchanegeably, spirit most often refers to mind, the citadel of the soul.

Whereas the material brain can be seen and its’ processes studied and measured, mind cannot be seen.
Intellect is a power or ability of mind while honesty is a virtue and also of the unseen dimension.

This means that the intellectual honesty boasted of by kosta50 is of the unseen dimension and cannot be seen nor sensed in any way, even by kosta50. Thus kosta50 can claim to possess intellectual honesty but it is by faith that he believes that he does in fact possess intellectual honesty.

Kosta50 requires that all who take part in this thread accept as real and true something which he cannot visibly and/or materially demonstrate. In other words, we must accept by faith that kosta50 possesses what he claims to have but which we cannot see or otherwise sense in any way.

Kosta50 cannot provide even the tiniest scrap of empirical evidence showing that he possesses intellectual honesty....let alone that he thinks. Yet fueled by arrogant egoism, he foolishly demands that his own Creator prove Himself to kosta50.

Pride blinds one to reality, which is why it always goes before a fall kosta50.

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