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.

A true atheist/agnostic would say that all this killing was a good thing, evolution at work — the clever, strong, industrious and skillful got rid of the weaker humans thus improving the gene pool. Indeed, he would say the genetically inferior should be killed in the womb or in infancy and if already matured then sterilized to prosper the gene pool. Eugenics or infanticide (e.g. Singer) follows from that worldview.

Where "man is the measure," this is the result we can expect — if history is any guide.

With God out of the picture — with truth and justice out of the picture — all that is left is the dynamic of power. The endgame is the "war of all against all," a lapse into the ideology of "the survival of the fittest."

Note: that's the "fittest"; not the "best." The laser-like focus on the physical eclipses all moral criteria.

Thus man ceases to be man, and finally becomes a "mere" animal....

And when man becomes an animal, he does not opt to be a dove. Rather he becomes a vicious beast, and the natural (and social) world becomes a spectacle of "Nature, red in tooth and claw," to quote Charles Darwin. Some folks evidently find this scenario appealing in some way. I do not for the life of me understand why.

Dearest sister in Christ, sometimes I wonder whether the human race has bifurcated into two camps: Those who are desperately trying to preserve their true (that is God-given) humanity in a chaotic world, and those who are trying to throw it away with both hands, thus further fanning the flames of chaos....

But the fact is the latter have reduced the universe to the size and competence of their mental operations. Surely, the world is "bigger" than that!

Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your most eloquent essay/post!

You may find this interesting:

Vampire Bats and the Golden Rule

Michael Shermer writes in The Science of Good and Evil: Why people cheat, gossip, care, share, and follow the golden rule:

Examples of premoral sentiments among animals abound. It has been well documented that vampire bats, for example, exhibit food-sharing behavior and the principle of reciprocity. They go out at night in hordes seeking large sleeping mammals from which they can suck blood. Not all are successful, yet all need to eat regularly because of their excessively high metabolism. On average, older experienced bats fail one night in ten, younger inexperienced bats fail one night in three.
Their solution: successful individuals regurgitate blood and share it with their less fortunate comrades, fully expecting reciprocity the next time they come home sans bacon. Gerald Wilkinson, in his extensive study of cooperation in vampire bats, has even identified a “buddy system” among bats, in which two individuals share and reciprocate from night to night, depending on their successes or failures. He found that the degree of affiliation between two bats—that is, the number of times they were observed together—predicted how often they would share food.
Since bats live for upwards of eighteen years among the same community, they know who the cooperators are and who the defectors are. Of course, the bats are not aware of being cooperative in any conscious goodwill sense. All animals, including human animals, are just trying to survive, and it turns out that cooperation is a good strategy.

This account of food sharing among vampire bats was recently broadcast on my favorite podcast, WNYC’s Radiolab.

Wilkinson, who conducted this research, describes summer nights he spent on a cattle ranch in Costa Rica, lying down inside of hollow, four-story trees along a river, getting pooped on while observing the bats. Often one bat would snuggle up to another bat and begin licking at its mouth, almost like they were kissing, but really she was licking up blood that the second bat was regurgitating.

WATCH VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loXKlwAjwfc&feature=player_embedded

Wilkinson then controlled which bats ate and which didn’t, and kept track of who fed whom, and he found that there are friendship networks among bats. If hungry Sally feeds full Agnes on the first day, then hungry Agnes invariably feeds full Sally the second day. And this isn’t just among related bats; friendship ties are actually more predictive than kinship ties of who feeds whom.

Wilkinson also mentions that large mammals were abundant on the plains 40,000 years ago. But when the large mammals became scarce due to climate changes, vampire bats had to develop a way of working together. Being nice wasn’t an option; it was the only way for the species to survive.

Have a listen to the broadcast: It’s 14:45 minutes long.

The moral of the story? Be nice. I know being nice can’t be taught in a lesson; it’s modeled. But if I’m asked to teach a family home evening lesson, I might as well keep the boys interested with blood-sucking, -pooping, -vomiting bats.

But there’s a second unspoken lesson here—that the existence of altruism, compassion, generosity, kinship, and compassion can be explained very well by natural selection.

Dubious? Read the book.

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