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.

- an agreed upon fact - the tomb was empty. But then were the disciples in any shape to 'steal' the body. No, they were hiding in fear of their lives

I see that as a story for public consumption, if you know what I mean, i.e. the "official story." But is there motive to steal a body and bury it elsewhere and proclaim resurrection? You bet. And only a handful needed to know the real truth. In other words, the evidence is inconclusive.

Would they willingly die for a testimony that Jesus had supernaturally risen? Hardly kosta because they knew it was a lie

Again, here we are dealing with inconclusive evidence. First of all, people die for all sorts of ideas. The very act of dying for them doesn't prove them true or genuine. Islamic suicide bombers blow themselves up for their faith every day it seems. is that proof that Mohammad is the prophet? Hardly.

Secondly, the story of Resurrection was the only way for the disciples to survive. They were on the wrong side of the law and they needed followers. And what better way to find followers than to tell them they saw risen Jesus? I am not saying this is what happened. I am simply raising logical objections to the story to show that reasonable alternatives exist.

There was no motive for Jesus' enemies to remove the body

That is obvious. The only people who could profit from an empty tomb were the disciples.

It is by sheer necessity, but the unreliability of eyewitness accounts is well documented and established...which is precisely why in criminal trials "beyond the shadow of a doubt" is the litmus test for evidence.

But it doesn't stop there for you kosta, this same Jesus was observed and spoke to these disciples on numerous occasions and up to as many as 500 at one time

G, some 7,000 people at Fatima "saw" the Sun "dance" and "fall" towards earth; some even reported feeling increased heat from the proximity of the Sun! The only source of such "eyewitness" accounts and numbers is a book that is not unbiased and that has an obvious agenda.

I think the word would have spread about this, and some evidence outside the Bible of such sightings would have been recoded or alluded to. At this point we have no such evidence. We only have Josephus who doesn't list sources and rather uses hearsay, which was the standard method of collecting 'data" in those days, again highly unreliable, essentially a "rumor mill".

But in the case of the NT kosta - even you know that 1 Corinthians is believed to have been written 50-60 AD, making it less than 30 years after Jesus....A parallel would be if someone constructing the idea in the 1990's that Kennedy never really died after the Dallas shooting, but the whole thing had been faked by Hollywood. Too many eyewitnesses still living that could contradict it. Myths can't develop into dogma in that short of time under those conditions kosta

I think there is a difference between someone being killed and being raised from the dead. Look at how many people believed the existence of the WMDs. Saddam used them, so a presumption that he had more was not baseless, but evidence showed that he didn't have any.

The investigators came back empty handed. Some where even accused of siding with Saddam. We had to sue a mole who basically fabricated the whole story, and because there was a desire to believe it, people believed it. It turns out the skeptics were right. But now it's moot point. And Fatima became a legend almost instantly.

So did Medjugorje, a site of an alleged sighting of Virgin Mary in Croatian Herzegovina in 1981, that's exactly 30 years ago. The site became a pilgrimage almost instantly. It didn't have to wait for decades.

Again I am not disagreeing with you or call your your arguments invalid but simply showing that the evidence is inconclusive. It's obvious that legends can begin almost instantly. We have no idea how many people were true eyewitnesses. Paul gratingly wasn't, and he preached far away from where events allegedly took place. Capapdoca and Thrace and Greece and Macedonia are quite a distance from Jerusalem.

Its first century expansion and development in the face of persecution and its maintenance throughout the second century persecutions and external attempts to co-opt and corrupt it. The Church would have continued to exist inspite of Constantine

Do you have reliable numbers how big the Church was? Of course not. No one was making a census of Christians. After all, it wasn't something people openly admitted. In the first century Christians were considered Jewish (it was a Jewess sect, after all), and were punished and counted along with the Jews. During the second century the church was in disarray (Marcion, Valentius, Tertullian, and Origen, Ebionites, and so on) due to the emergence of various cults and sects.

There are no reliable figures on the number of Christians because of the preponderance of various sects (all of whihc wewre "Christian"), except that they were mostly persecuted by Romans who considered them "cannibals." There were very few state-organized pogroms of them.

They were mostly underground groups, meeitng in catacombs, with no power of influence, generally considered "effeminate" and characterized as being made up mostly of women, as a faddish movement.

No doubt the church would have continued to live, just as many other religious continue to live. Can you explain the "phenomenon of Islam," and its successful growth with the resurrection?

The definitive evidences have been cited - you choose to ignore or try to explain them away.

The evidence is inconclusive, G. It requires a "leap of faith", no pun intended, to come to a conclusion.

Sorry, but what you said makes no sense at all. Are you trying to say that we have to live with uncertainty? That is very true, but it is very different from not knowing.

I'm trying to say that we accept things on faith all the time, whether we acknowledge it or not. So it is with God. He says that in order to please him we must come to him in faith. We must "believe that he is and a rewarder of those who diligently seek him". You cannot possibly know all there is to know about anything, nor can anyone else. We all walk by faith in certain ways but some abhor admitting it, though it doesn't change the truth. You hop in your car and start it up with no thought as to whether it will start simply because it has in the past. You plop down on a chair without first examining it to test its strength to support you. My Mom lifted up her toilet seat the other day to sit down and a frog was staring up at her! She shrieked! It was funny and we had a laugh. My point is we exhibit faith all the time. So unless you have OCD, you do too.

That is what God wants from us. Simple child-like faith that believes - takes him at his word. In return, he says he will reward that faith with seeing. Believing is seeing with Him. I didn't make the rules but I have found out for myself that it IS true, it IS real, it IS knowable. It's there for any and everyone to find out for themselves. Don't let your pride or your friends or anything keep you from discovering God for yourself. All anyone can do is point you to him. It's up to you to take that step of faith.

Easy. A purely evil god would mean nothing created could be good. Good cannot come from evil. Evil exists only because there is free will. Free will is good. Because there IS good in the world shows that the Creator is good. There had to be truth before there was a lie.

Who says pure evil cannot create good? I didn't see any rule book that states before creation God can't be pure evil and all powerful. If that's what it is - that's what it is.

Now if that pure evil God wants to conjure up some stuff that sure looks like "good" to us mere mortal humans, it wouldn't take him much at all. He just has to think "illusion of good", and then blink his eyes and there it is.

As for free will - what is that other than one more thing the evil God gave us to help our torture in hell in hell for believers in his fake Magic Book will be all the more sweet? "Heheheh! I gave them 'free will' and now the idiots must think I'm a good God!! They're so stupid!"

Because there is good in the world it shows that the evil God wanted us to be thoroughly tricked by his illusions of good. There had to be truth before there was a lie, and that truth was pure evil.

Your conclusions on this subject are expected from anyone who denies the reality of the resurrection. The only reason that people do this is, because of all the things that happened during and after the time of Jesus, the resurrection becomes the pivotal point of Christianity. As Paul said, if Christ be not raised we are dead in our sins and are of all men most miserable. He was himself a witness of the resurrection and he gave up EVERYTHING for it. He changed from a persecutor of Christians into its greatest evangelist. Why? Because he wanted a following? Give me break! A very good article on this subject is found at: http://www.faithfacts.org/search-for-truth/contemporary-scholarship

We can try to explain these appearances away as hallucinations if we wish, but we cannot deny they occurred. Paul's information makes it certain that on separate occasions various individuals and groups saw Jesus alive from the dead. According to Norman Perrin, the late NT critic of the University of Chicago: "The more we study the tradition with regard to the appearances, the firmer the rock begins to appear upon which they are based." This conclusion is virtually indisputable.

At the same time that biblical scholarship has come to a new appreciation of the historical credibility of Paul's information, however, it must be admitted that skepticism concerning the appearance traditions in the gospels persists. This lingering skepticism seems to me to be entirely unjustified. It is based on a presuppositional antipathy toward the physicalism of the gospel appearance stories. But the traditions underlying those appearance stories may well be as reliable as Paul's. For in order for these stories to be in the main legendary, a very considerable length of time must be available for the evolution and development of the traditions until the historical elements have been supplanted by unhistorical [elements].

The writings of Herodotus furnish a test case for the rate of legendary accumulation, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states for these to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be 'unbelievable'; more generations are needed. All NT scholars agree that the gospels were written down and circulated within the first generation, during the lifetime of the eyewitnesses. Indeed, a significant new movement of biblical scholarship argues persuasively that some of the gospels were written by the AD 50's. This places them as early as Paul's letter to the Corinthians and, given their equal reliance upon prior tradition, they ought therefore to be accorded the same weight of historical credibility accorded Paul.

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