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.

Kosta - I'm afraid your example here condems your denial based upon so called unreliable eyewitness testimony -

One of his clearest memories of Bloody Sunday is of a soldier in a red beret, crouched on one knee, leveling his self-loading rifle towards him. Yet in all photographs of the scene, the soldier is not wearing a red beret, but a helmet.

Was the car green or blue kosta? His memory about the soldier pointing a rifle at him was valid. It didn't fail on that key emotionally laden point. What failed - what kind of head gear he had on.

My question to you kosta is how can you equate that to the testimony of the empty tomb? Did they find it empty or not? It is not a question about a hat - it is a question about the rifle pointed at you. It is the gross scenario that remains intact kosta. BTW, Tereshchuk was trying to remember and event 26 years prior. The apostles were relating an event 50 days prior. So even on this level kosta - the comparison breaks down. What is the important point - the rifle being pointed at him, whats the important point - the tomb was found to be empty.

As regards the NT eyewitnesses, we have no names, no photographs to compare against our memory.

Wrong, the NT lists witnesses. They were not having to remember something that had occured 25 years before, but 50 days (with the interveining days having the risen Jesus meet with them).

No doubt, they saw something and no doubt they believed what they saw (and wanted to see), but we have no guarantee or any way of ascertaining that they saw what they claimed they saw.

"wanted to see" - addressed already - nothing prepared them for an empty tomb kosta. Was a body there or not? Their actions and the actions of the disciples and early church is founded on a declared fact - Jesus bodily resurrected from the dead and the tomb was empty. That was the message from day one. If the body was there - the opponents of Christianity would have produced it - instead of trying to explain it away. Sorry kosta - you train of logic continues to derail on the simple fact of hostile witnesses alone, in addition to the other items I've cited.

The odds are simply stacked against eyewitness accounts being what they claim to be. That's why our course require the highest degree of certitude possible (beyond the shadow of a doubt) before convicting someone on circumstantial evidence.

Be clear kosta - what part of whether or not the tomb was empty is subject to unreliability? You have the women who found it empty, you have the disciples who found it empty and you have the guards and high priests who found it empty. Please specify further kosta, because your unreliable witness theory is just not up to the task of accounting for ALL of the facts and eyewitness testimony.

As I said earlier, people do not walk out of their graves after being dead for days. But I could be wrong, however I wager the other side could be just as wrong, and probably more likely so.

No they don't - yet that is exactly what the disciples saw and taught from day one. As I've pointed out - if the tomb wasn't empty - they would have been exposed very easily. And it is highly unlikely that they removed the body - they feared for their life and a scrap with roman guards was the last thing on their mind.

The evidence of the testimony of eyewitnesses - friendly and hostile, up to 500 seeing Jesus at one time - times where he appeared unexpectedly (unlike fatima where an apparation was expected).

LG, there are pink unicorns on Jupiter. I knolw because Zeus told me so and I worte it down in his own words. That is my proof.

They are orange....

however, on a serious note, let's take it this way -- do you kosta or LG really, honestly believe that there is nothing out there? No spirit, no something? I'm not talking about a Christian God, I'm not even talking about a God, maybe midichlorians?

During my atheist phase I poured over books on cosmology and was haunted by the fact that if the universe is boundless, it must be contained in something, right? By physical laws, how can it contain itself?

Alternatively, if death is the end, meaningless, the end of existence, what is the point?

I read through Buddhism and dismissed it as half-hearted still holding on to deism and moved to Jainism. Jainism is atheist, stark and unbending with the aim of becoming an adinath -- to reach the highest level of existence, which is to forget the material existence. There are no gods, definitely no creator god, there is nothingness.

Hinduism with this also gives you the sense of the inexorable, the hopelessness

the Semitic religions, at least Judaism and orthodoxy Christianity and Zoroastrianism give relief from the inexorable

However Islam and Calvinism give you all the horrors of the inexorable -- existence is controlled by rules one does not fathom, one cannot propiate, one cannot control, one is less than a Kafkaesque caricature sentenced to death for an unknown crime by unknown persons.

Both Islam and Calvinism seem like a case of horror -- sheer unending horror. Every slip becomes a case of "was I ever saved or not?"

Pentecostalism and Born-againism treats the inexorable much like Hinduism -- sing and dance and ignore the horror awaiting or just let's play with the theological construct

No, in my humble opinion only orthodoxy and zoroastrianism, logically provide the constructs that give hope, that make us human seeking to move forward.

As any intellectually honest and "careful" reader of the above would have to admit, I never accused you of saying "God is dead".

Then you could have just said you use the term ressentiment as he did. Throwing in the '"God is dead" nihilist' associates me, errnoneously, with "'God is dead" nihilism."

You can quote soemone's term without approving, promoting or agreeing with his or her entire philosophy. His definition of ressentiment in particular describes a certain type of Christian which I find particularly fitting. That's all. There is no connection in my usage of it to his "God is dead" slogan, or his stand on nihilism whatsoever.

If your purpose isn't to smear Christians "with that word", just like he does, what IS your purpose for quoting him?

My aim was to show that, in my opinion, he accurately described some of the more hateful members of the Christian family, the people of ressentiment, who profess love but practice hate. Calling spade a spade is not "smearing" but calling it like it is.

And on the matter of "nihilism" and whether or not Nietzsche was a "nihilist", you don't know what you're talking about. All I had to do to make at short and sweet Google search just now using these key words: Google search words result:

Then you conveniently left out true description of what Nietzsche was talking about, namely

diagnosis of nihilism

as a widespread phenomenon of western culture

That hardly makes Nietzsche a nihilst.

he uses the term in a variety of ways, with different meanings and connotations

Again, that hardly makes him a nihilist.

The death of God, in particular the statement that "we killed him", is similar to the self-dissolution of Christian doctrine: "due to the advances of the sciences"

Well, no doubt, science certainly "killed" God when it comes to diseases being caused by 'evil spirits' or similar superstitious beliefs closely associated with re;igion. I am sure the fact that science does this on a daily basis is a source of animosity among some fundamental Christians with respect to science.

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