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.

cronos: I'm talking about the entire BA philosophy which expunges and belittles scholarship -- as an adverse reaction to Calvinism's human logic reducto

f you mean ignoring scholarship as a requirement for salvation is belittling scholarship, well sorry then you must accept it. God does not require a cap and gown for entry into heaven.

No, that is the other extreme -- the Calvinist extreme that I pointed out. As I said, the BA version is the adverse reaction to the extremes of Calvinism, which, as you correctly point out is wrong as God does not require a cap and gown for entry into heaven

However, the position taken by the BAs is also wrong -- for the opposite reason. There is to be a balance, my friend, not this wild swinging from side to side

As GK Chesterton expressed so well in his Orthodoxy

"Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean, and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten forests of the north. Of these theological equalisations I have to speak afterwards. Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.

"This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom -- that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect."

Sorry, maybe if I format that, it would be easier to read

"This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.
It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.
The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism.
She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles.
She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly.
The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly.
The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination.
It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic.
It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own.
It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.
To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom -- that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.
To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame.
But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure;
and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect."

as he pointed out "It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own." -- and today's flavor is BA. in the 1800s it was Calvinism, puritanism even, but now it veers to the other extreme

no, it gives a very good description of the problem that is the BAers v/s the Calvinists.

For example It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. -- the BA philosophy is today's "age", just like Arianism, Gnosticism, Calvinism, etc. had their "age". It's easy to fall for this flavor of the decade or century

But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure;

The extremes are easy to sink in to and seem correct for those times, but that is the problem, they are of those times only. The BA philosophy, as I said, has some good, but the problem is that it is so curtailed and cut short of the entire 'good' that is the Word of God, that it is hollow and alone, like tantric dancers fighting away the sense of the impending by ignoring it utterly in a trance

The wisdom of God is here

Mk 16:16, Lk 13:3, Jn 6:54, Matt 23:13 are Jesus's own words telling us that

He who believes
and is baptized will be saved.
[U]nless you repent you will all likewise perish
[H]e who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day
he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved

These are the Lord's very own words His very own statements, exhortations, commands.
this is not the philosophy or wisdom of men, this what God Himself has commanded.

Remember,

cronos: I'm talking about the entire BA philosophy which expunges and belittles scholarship -- as an adverse reaction to Calvinism's human logic reducto

andrew: f you mean ignoring scholarship as a requirement for salvation is belittling scholarship, well sorry then you must accept it. God does not require a cap and gown for entry into heaven.

That is the other extreme -- the Calvinist extreme that I pointed out. As I said, the BA version is the adverse reaction to the extremes of Calvinism, which, as you correctly point out is wrong as God does not require a cap and gown for entry into heaven

However, the position taken by the BAs is also wrong -- for the opposite reason. There is to be a balance, my friend, not this wild swinging from side to side remember God Himself gave a clear picture in the Gospels in Mk 16:16, Lk 13:3, Jn 6:54, Matt 23:13 which are Jesus's own words telling us that

He who believes
and is baptized will be saved.
[U]nless you repent you will all likewise perish
[H]e who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day
he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved

These are the Lord's very own words His very own statements, exhortations, commands.

this is not the philosophy or wisdom of men, this what God Himself has commanded.

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