Last Christmas Eve, I argued that the belief that God “guided evolution” was not a rationally respectable way to reconcile science with faith but rather it was essentially an effective denial of the theory of natural selection, in its scientifically explanatory sense. Part of the revolutionary character of the discovery of evolution by natural selection [...]
So Chris Mooney’s article in Playboy about the spirituality of scientists has sparked some interesting debate in the atheist blogosphere. His new post on the subject explicitly interprets his aims and themes in the piece as essentially saying what I interpreted them to be—to defend the idea that you can have completely sufficient spirituality without [...]
Jerry Coyne explains why the proposed idea of a single pair of original human ancestors is refuted by what we know of our evolutionary ancestry: Over at the Templeton-funded BioLogos website there has been a lot of discussion about the historicity of Adam and Eve. This is a problem because scripture claims these two were [...]
Last week I highlighted both a portion of Jerry Coyne’s report from AAI and independently Andrew Sullivan’s nasty retort to another portion of that same post. But I never quoted the really fun and on target coinage of Daniel Dennett which got so far under Sullivan’s skin: Dan Dennett talked about interviews with active priests [...]
A poignant two paragraphs from Jerry Coyne’s piece reporting from the AAI that I mentioned Andrew Sullivan maligned earlier: It’s the first time I’ve been in a group of fellow atheists (and I haven’t detected one sign of stridency or militancy), and it gives one a warm supportive feeling. One of the functions of speaking [...]
My previous post today on religious scientists was based on a comment I first made on the blog He Lives in reply to a post there. Below is a subsequent comment from that blog from “Wandering Internet Commenter” interspersed with my replies to him. Normative arguments are fun and all, but it never hurt to [...]
As we have already noted previously, Jerry Coyne has attacked the notion that scientific illiteracy can be blamed on the recent rise of the New Atheists as though they have scared religious people away from science in their mere 5 years as an identifiable movement. Recently in reply to this debate between “New Atheists” like [...]
Two weeks ago, I profiled various remarks from Jerry Coyne for the incisive way they challenged assumptions that (1) religion is indispensable for moral progress, (2) that religion is even on balance usually an aid to moral progress, and (3) that moral progress is even something observable over the course of history. Coyne’s remarks were written [...]
Jerry Coyne pushes back hard (again) against the latest publication of the falsehood that American resistance to evolution is the New Atheists’ fault: 1. The “new atheists” have been on the scene for exactly five years, beginning with Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, published in 2004. But American’s attitudes to evolution have been relatively [...]
As part of a 9 page critical review of Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, Jerry Coyne levels more than a few incisive challenges countering Wright’s faith in religion as an indispensible aid to moral progress. Here are just a few of Coyne’s key points. First he enlists David Hume to challenge Wright’s assumption that [...]
PZ Myers recaps some of the highlights of what he found to be a frustratingly insubstantial discussion between historian of science Ron Numbers and creationist Paul Nelson. Myers writes: His example was to talk about the argument from imperfections, the fact that many of the points Coyne made as evidence of evolution were from sub-optimal [...]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6KGZ4UQjgc&hl=en&fs=1&] From the always terrific Everything Is Terrible via Jerry Coyne.
I love it—this is the great new name from one of Jerry Coyne’s readers for referring to: those atheists who are nonetheless soft on faith (i.e., atheist accommodationists). the kind of people, like Michael Ruse, who say, “I am an atheist, but . . .”. In other words, the folks who, says Daniel Dennett, have [...]
