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.

Careful there, my FRiend. Your opponents will judge you by some standard they don't believe in. ;-)

That's just it - atheists cannot have any objective moral standards. They are necessarily ethical scavengers. When an atheist tries to discuss moral issues with a theist, they usually do so by completely miscomprehending the theists starting point, and then try to play little "gotcha" games that are based off of those miscomprehensions.

Like let's take James C. Bennett on here. He goes on and on about David and Bathsheba's baby, though he is probably too badly informed and unknowledgeable about the source material to know that what was going on was basically the judgment that David himself had pronounced, and he was just receiving what he had said would be fair judgment in such a case.

Nevermind the fact that the baby also went to heaven, which means that the little guy didn't even have to go through a lifetime of suffering at the hands of his fellow human beings...which is more than we can say for many who had to endure years, or even lifetimes, under the sort of regimes that people with the same type of worldview as James C. Bennett imposed on them. As such, the child didn't even undergo what can reasonably even be called a "punishment."

So, while Jimmie goes on about Bathsheba's baby and all that, he completely dismisses the millions who died because of explicit atheist regimes. Religious people, well, see they're responsible for anything bad that anyone religious, anywhere, might have done, but not us atheists. No true atheist...and all that.

Alright then, give me the context and circumstances that make the killing of those children good "

Why do you engage in conversational disputes regarding that which you must, as a materialist, deny. You deny the existence of God, yet you get involved with a discussion denegrating that which you say does not exist. You reference a demand to be given an explaination of something which you imply is not good, when in the materialist, darwinists world there can be no good or bad. Things in the materialsts' world...just are. In your worldview morality cannot be accounted for with logic, reason, or rational thought because all logic, rational thought, and reason would have to have a material explaination, yet these are invarient, abstract entities. Or...do you deny that logic exists. To be a consistent materialist you must deny that which is not consistent with the physicalists worldview. If you agree that logic does exist, you must enter the world beyond the physical (Aristotle writings Metaphysic) or the metaphysical for an explaination. To do this, you must reason, by use of the invarient laws of logic,...but again the physicalist has no explaination for reason from a materialist world view. In fact...to reason you must use your mind...which cannot be accounted for by a physicalists worldview. Do you deny that minds other than yours exist? If so, you affirm that which is metaphysical (beyond physics).

Now I do not say that you do not use logic, rational thought, and reason in your worldview....you simply cannot account for them in your worldview.

What is even more ironic is that the darwinist, materialist, materialist have coopted institutions of higher education, declaring themselves to be the champions of reason, logic, and rational thought, but have to borrow from the JudeoChristian worldview to account of the laws of logic and reason even as they denounce Christian worldview.

If they used their minds for logical discernment they would realize their worldview demands that they can believe in nothing. Why would you believe in anything which results from the chemical-physical processes of a mass of gray matter where electron potentials are depolarized across semipermeable membranes. Chemicals don't reason....they react. So they can give no reason supported logically for believing anything. In their world there is no reason to believe anything is good or bad or right or wrong or human rights or justice or injustice or any way to measure moral difference or truth. Things just are in the materialist worldview. To bludgeon a baby to death, in a materialists worldview, is no different morally than to pick an apple. Every act is determined by laws of physics and chemistry. Why would anyone become concerned about picking an apple or, say, picking an apple? Murder, rape, genocide, torture, or any heinous act cannot be criticized in the materialist view, IF, they are to be consistent.

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