Is there discrimination in science against women?

February 9, 2011 • 7:07 am

Be prepared for a deluge of discussion in the websiteosphere.  There’s a new paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams (you can haz free access from the link) that’s going to be controversial, for it tackles a subject that has become a minefield in academia: gender bias.

It has long been the conventional wisdom in science that women are discriminated against in publication (female-authored manuscripts are said to be rejected more often than those written by males), in funding (female-authored grants are less successful), and in hiring.  This, it is said, accounts for the underrepresentation of women in some areas of science, particularly math-related areas like physics.  As Ceci and Williams note, “among the top 100 US universities, only 8.8-15% of tenure-track positions in many math-intensive fields (combined across ranks) are held by women, and female full professors number <10%”.

The authors simply surveyed a number of studies (and there are many) addressing these claims.  It turns out that, since at least the late 1970s, the claims of biases in publication, funding, and hiring aren’t borne out by the data: the usual citations of biases are based on only a handful of studies whose results have not been replicated by other work.  In general, the authors show that in the three areas of “bias” mentioned above, women are on par with men.  An occasional study will show inequities, but these seem to go against men as often as against women. (Their conclusions apply not just to math-related areas, but to science in general.)

The authors are perfectly aware of the political implications of their findings.  As Steve Pinker has pointed out repeatedly, the academy does not welcome results like this, and researchers who produce them can be subject to accusations of sexism (although one of the authors of this paper is a woman) and of justifying or enabling further discrimination against women.  So when you read the paper, notice that it is loaded to the gunwales with caveats—so many of them that they become almost annoying, like repeatedly hearing “We’re so sorry to have to tell you our findings.”  But it’s important to know what they’re saying.  First, they’re not saying that discrimination against women in funding, hiring, and publication never existed.  It almost certainly did thirty years ago; the authors are talking about more recent studies.  And discrimination back then can still affect inequities in the representation of females who began their academic careers, as I did, in the 1970s.

Most important, the authors are not saying that there are no factors that hold women back from achieving parity with men.  While ruling out discrimination in hiring, funding, and publication, they note that the lack of parity results from other factors, some of them voluntary, others not.  Much of it, as you might expect, comes down to reproduction:

Despite frequent assertions that women’s current underrepresentation in math-intensive fields is caused by sex discrimination by grant agencies, journal reviewers, and search committees, the evidence shows women fare as well as men in hiring, funding, and publishing (given comparable resources). That women tend to occupy positions offering fewer resources is not due to women being bypassed in interviewing and hiring or being denied grants and journal publications because of their sex. It is due primarily to factors surrounding family formation and childrearing, gendered expectations, lifestyle choices, and career preferences—some originating before or during adolescence (3, 50, 54, 58) (SI Text, S9)—and secondarily to sex differences at the extreme right tail of mathematics performance on tests used as gateways to graduate school admission (SI Text, S10).

Ceci and Williams don’t talk much about differences in performance on grad-school exams in math (you’ll remember that when Larry Summers claimed that the lower success of women in math and physics reflected innate biological differences, it helped bring him down as president of Harvard).  But the authors do note that while this difference in test performance is statistically significant, it can’t account for the disparity in the number of women in math-related fields.  That’s because while there is a lower proportion of women in the upper tails of the distribution of test scores, the proportion of female faculty in math-related fields is much lower than even that proportion.

The authors posit that the lower representation of women among math-related faculty, then, is due to women’s lack of those resources necessary for professional success (“resources” include positions at research-oriented colleges rather than teaching colleges and two-year institutions).  The reproductive component is seen as important:

Given equivalent resources, men and women do equally well in publishing. A key issue, separable from sex discrimination in manuscript evaluation, is why women occupy positions providing fewer resources and what can be done about this situation. This situation is caused mainly by women’s choices, both freely made and constrained by biology and society, such as choices to defer careers to raise children, follow spouses’ career moves, care for elderly parents, limit job searches geographically, and enhance work-home balance. Some of these choices are freely made; others are constrained and could be changed (3).

I’m not a sociologist, and hardly an expert in this area, so all I can say is that their data seem sound, regardless of the conclusions and prescriptions.  And why, exactly, do the authors see their findings as important? Because, they claim, we can’t fix the problem of gender inequity unless we correctly identify its cause.  This is what they say in the analysis of “publication”, but it applies to grants and hiring as well:

However, a secondary issue is whether resources themselves are, in fact, evenly distributed between the sexes. The answer is that they are not, for a complex constellation of reasons, such as women being more apt to occupy teaching-intensive positions, part-time positions, etc. Thus, the attention devoted to righting perceptions of sex discrimination in reviewing of manuscripts, which as we show, does not in fact exist (SI Text, S2), focuses on a spurious issue and detracts from the very real problem that does plague women in publishing—the fact that women more often than men lack resources necessary to produce high-quality work.

At the end of the paper, Ceci and Williams suggest a number of solutions for giving women equal access to resources, including changes in the tenure system to allow for reproductive differences, the provision of research help during leave for childbirth, and changes in the policy of funding agencies.  These may remedy some of the inequities that arise from even the voluntary choices women make that lead to their underrepresentation in academia.  And, of course, the issue remains, politically volatile as it is, whether we should be fostering equality of opportunity (both sexes get equal access to resources) or equality of outcome, i.e., will we be satisfied only when half of all faculty positions in every field are occupied by women and half by men? If we do not achieve this parity across the board, does that prove discrimination?

The prospect of unequal desires and abilities based on biological rather than cultural differences is one of the biggest minefields in academia—so much so that it’s become nearly taboo to raise the issue.  This is the subject of Monday’s New York Times piece by John Tierney discussing Ceci and Williams’s paper.  Tierney describes the claim of John Haidt, a social psychologist from The University of Virginia, that there is discrimination against conservatives in academia, and that they are woefully underrepresented on faculties.

It [the “bias”] was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Haidt’s equation of conservatives with other underrepresented minorities, and his calls for “affirmative action for conservatives.” (I note in passing that Haidt garnered a Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology.) After all, your political views are something that you choose, but you can’t choose your gender or ethnicity. And conservatives have hardly suffered “oppression” in the same way as women and African-Americans.

But I do think that scientific claims which are perceived as conservative or hereditarian are often dismissed on political grounds alone, and that’s not a good thing.  We’re supposed to discuss ideas freely, and adjudicate them on evidence, not on how much they appeal to us ideologically.  It’s not good if there is an informal ideological ban on discussing, for example, biological differences between genders. After all, we’re supposed to examine ideas freely regardless of their perceived political or religious consequences: that’s one of the pillars of humanism.  We may like the prospect of eternal life, but as good atheists we know that we shouldn’t mistake what want to be true for what is true.  A priori suppression of discussion can only inhibit finding the truth.

So discuss the PNAS paper freely, though I adjure you to read it before you discuss it. (Since it’s free, you have no excuse not to read it!)  And please don’t take the few paragraphs I’ve extracted as representing the entire contents of the paper.

Quote of the week

February 8, 2011 • 3:47 pm

From Eric MacDonald, who’s really on a roll these days.  I’m so glad he started his own website.

There is a fundamental dishonesty built into religion. It comes out clearly in John Shook’s book, The God Debates, that I am reading just now. John Shook thinks that it is incumbent upon atheists to join in the God debates, to learn as much as we can about religion and its argumentation so that we can join in the debates at a reasonably high level of sophistication. This I am willing to do, because it amuses me, but when you come upon things like the following, one has to admit that the argument is about air (and I apologise beforehand for quoting at such length):

There are two basic ways to design nonexistence proofs. The “dialectical nonexistence proof’ argues that two or more characteristics of a specific god are logically incompatible. A definition of something having logically incompatible characteristics can only be the definition of a necessarily nonexistent entity. Successful dialectical nonexistence proofs can show that specific kinds of gods cannot exist. For example, many Christians believe both that god is perfect and that god can suffer along with us. Maybe these two characteristics are contradictory. Figuring out how a perfect being can suffer requires conceptual refinements to god to avoid the negative verdict of a dialectical nonexistence proof. And even if these refinements go badly and one characteristic of god must go, theology can revise its conception of god. Avoiding dialectical nonexistence proofs is, from a flexible theology’s point of view, just another way for humanity to learn more about god.

This is not a caricature. This is the way theologians actually go to work. For example, Chapter 4 (“Divine Agency, Remodeled”) of Marilyn McCord Adams’ book Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, is devoted to precisely this process of redefining God in such a way as to accommodate both God’s goodness and the manifest evils of the world. It is simply preposterous to suggest that this is an appropriate procedure for learning anything about anything. It’s a bit like making the crime fit the punishment, rather than the other way about.

Vernon + Midgley + evolution = FAIL

February 8, 2011 • 10:41 am

What a dire combination:  Mark Vernon, ex-Anglican priest and now purveyer of aphophatic Christianity (remember the Holy Rabbit?), and Mary Midgley, famous for completely misunderstanding modern evolutionary biology and for attacking Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene on completely ludicrous grounds.  (See Dawkins’s response here.) In a prime case of the bland leading the blind, Vernon is editing a new book series about heretics, and, lo and behold, the first victim is evolution:

The first book in the Heretics series is a broadside against neo-Darwinism by an eminent British moral philosopher. Mary Midgley’s The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene typifies what Heretics will present, says the editor of the series, Mark Vernon: “New ideas tend to be the products of heretics, so that you could say that Jesus was a sort of Jewish heretic; and you could say that Buddha was a sort of Hindu heretic; Einstein was a sort of Newtonian heretic, and so on—Darwin was a Paley heretic.”

Vernon says he is designing the series to give voice to thinkers who have long been battling a tradition in science, philosophy, or religion.

And what is Midgley’s “contribution”? As always, it’s the claim that neo-Darwinism is a nefarious and selfish enterprise, and that the word “selfish” in “selfish gene” is profoundly misleading and socially damaging:

She contends that neo-Darwinists distort Darwin’s view of individualism as biologically influenced but essentially social.

Midgley argues that the neo-Darwinist perspective rests on an ethos of free-enterprise competition distorted by “the supposedly Darwinian belief in natural selection as a pervasive, irresistible cosmic force” that operates in social and metaphysical realms as well as in physical, biological ones. It results, she writes, in “unbridled, savage competition between the genes” that operates with mythic force within any individual body.

As much as the logic behind the complex scientific conceptions of neo-Darwinism, Midgley takes issue with the metaphors neo-Darwinists use, starting with Dawkins’s title for his best-selling 1976 work of science popularization, The Selfish Gene. Such metaphors matter because “our imaginations feed on striking myths like this much more than we notice,” she writes in the new book.

Midgley has often argued that saying a gene is “selfish” is not only a metaphor, because metaphors are never “only” anything. Rather, neo-Darwinists’ forceful, reiterated metaphors underpin a fatalistic drama of “helpless humans enslaved by a callous fate-figure” that, like all such myths, conveys meaninglessness and a “sinister” advocacy of “unqualified egoism” that she thinks has been socially catastrophic.

Of course a metaphor can be “only”!  Dawkins intended the word “selfish” to mean that, during the process of natural selection, genes behave as if they are selfish.  That metaphor has been immensely fruitful, helping (along with the work of G. C. Williams) promote the gene-centered approach to evolution, a perspective that has inspired reams of useful research. As for the rest of Midgley’s dumb contentions—that neo-Darwinism has been socially catastrophic, evil, and the like—there’s not a shred of evidence, just the lucubrations of a superannuated philosopher.

What other books does Vernon have in store?  There are three, all, predictably, works of accomodationism:

One is by Tim Crane, a University of Cambridge philosopher of the mind and metaphysics. His working title is “Against Humanism” and he “has a bone to pick with organized humanism,” says Vernon.

Also in the works, he says, is “a quite straightforward credo” from Mary Warnock, whom the Guardian newspaper described in 2005 as “Britain’s chief moral referee for the past 30 years.” Vernon says: “She greatly appreciates religious traditions and particularly religious music and she’s written about how moving she finds religious music—that it suggests that something powerful is being communicated—but she doesn’t believe that what is being communicated is God.”

Finally, says Vernon, Julia Neuberger, a rabbi, social reformer, and Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords, is at work on a new book about “how a number of characteristics of Reform Judaism, which is her tradition, may be of great benefit to us who live in a plural world. For example, it’s assumed in Judaism that you’ll argue with your fellow Jews and disagree with them, and yet you’ll still have a sense that you belong together.”

The author of this piece, Peter Monaghan, notes that Midgley is “often called the greatest living British moral philosopher.” Now, I’ve followed only her writings on evolution and not her other works, but it’s hard for me to believe that someone who is so misguided about natural selection can be an intellectual giant in philosophy.  Doesn’t critical thinking transfer from one area to the other?

Note that this free publicity for misguided attacks on evolution appears in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is rapidly becoming a vehicle for faitheism and accommodationism.


Kitteh contest: Lily

February 8, 2011 • 6:53 am

Owner David has sent us an entry appropriate for this frigid weather. It’s his cat Lily, who’s figured out a unique way to beat the cold.

We adopted Lily from the local animal shelter who rescued her from the mean, snowy streets of Maine. With such a beginning to her life, it is no wonder that she is always in search of comfort and luxury. When we’re not home to provide a comfortable lap, and there are no pools of sunshine to enjoy, Lily has turned to some highly creative solutions to meet her need for warmth. Of course Lily, as with all great kittehs, has other facets to her personality. As a kitten, after waking us up repeatedly with sharp bites to the toes at 6 AM, Lily was diagnosed with “aggressive play” tendencies. I guess you can take the kitteh off the street but not take the street out of the kitteh. She loves to be chased around the house, spun around on the hardwood floor, and pushed around a bit. She responds with flattened ears and defiant snorts, and dishes out vigorous pummeling with her paws.  Of course, minutes later she is back stretched out on our laps in glorious repose.

I love the forepaws tucked into the heater slot!

They’ve got a little list

February 8, 2011 • 6:19 am

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!

–Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado

We should be getting used to this now: our fellow atheists proclaim their eternal allegiance to the cause of godlessness, but then decry the incivility of certain people who besmirch our joint cause.  The thing is, these miscreants are never named.  If really pressed, the accusers usually name someone who has made intemperate remarks in the “comments” section of Pharyngula.   It’s not clear to me why atheists, who, after all, are supposed to rely on empirical evidence and reason, are so reluctant to give examples of Atheist Bad Behavior.

And so we have, over at 3QuarksDaily, Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse, who are about to release a pro-atheist book.  But, in a post called “Accommodationism and atheism,” they’re plenty peeved:

Our book Reasonable Atheism does not publish until April, yet we have already been charged with accommodationism, the cardinal sin amongst so-called New Atheists.  The charge derives mainly from the subtitle of our book, “a moral case for respectful disbelief.”  Our offense consists in embracing idea that atheists owe to religious believers anything like respect.

I don’t know who has called them “accommodationists”—it’s certainly neither me nor P.Z., and Aikin and Talisse are silent about who has ticked them off.  But never mind.  They go on to draw the usual distinction between attacking ideas and attacking people, and fault many atheists with the latter behavior.  We’re said to regard the faithful with contempt, treating them to their faces as fools or even as being afflicted with mental illness.   Here’s how, they say, we behave:

The proper response to this state of affairs [apparently rational but faithful people] is to address religious believers as fellow rational agents, to elicit from them their best arguments and their conception of what evidence there is, and to make a case for one’s own view.  Correspondingly, it is foolish to begin with an effort to discredit the intellects of religious believers or to diagnose them as benighted, foolish, and intellectually cowardly.  To be sure, there are plenty of religious believers who fit these descriptions.  But there are plenty of atheists who do too.  It is here we part ways with the New Atheists, as what makes one a fool is not what one believes, but rather how one’s beliefs are related to one’s evidence. . .

. . . But notice that to hold a person in contempt is to ascribe to him a capacity for responsibility.  Accordingly, we do not hold the mentally deranged in contempt for their delusional beliefs; rather, we see their beliefs as symptoms of their illness.  To see religious believers as proper objects of contempt, then, is to see them as people who should know better than to believe as they do.  It is hence to see them as wrong but, importantly, not stupid.

The thing is, Aikin and Talisse do not name a single person supposedly guilty of this behavior, nor give a single example of it!  We should be getting used to this, I guess, but it’s still annoying.  Remember this unsupported accusation?:

Many of my colleagues are fans of Dawkins, PZ, and their ilk and make a point AT CONSERVATION EVENTS to mock the religious to their face, shout forced laughter at them, and call them “stupid,” “ignorant” and the like – and these are events hosted by religious moderates where we’ve been ASKED to attend. They think it’s the way to be a good scientist, after all.

Of course, it’s proper to hold some believers in contempt.  Aikin and Talisse note that maybe this is okay if the people have been given a chance to see their errors:

Yet having false beliefs does not make one stupid; it simply makes one wrong.  The stupid person is one who believes against what he takes to be evidence.  And, as it turns out, there are very few stupid people.  Yet there is a lot of false believing going on; in fact, we hold that in matters of religion, there is a lot of belief in what is demonstrably and obviously false.

So who are these atheists who continually harangue reasonable religious people, calling them stupid to their faces? I guess P.Z. and I sometimes mock the faithful, but those are almost always folks who have been informed of the evidence against their beliefs (creationists, for example) but hold onto them despite that.  Clearly I don’t always treat the faithful with contempt. When I recently chewed over faith and science with some Methodists, for example, I was polite and civil.

Who are these sinners?  It can’t be Dan Dennett—he’s cuddly and nice. (One of my great moments was getting a hug from him after Big Meanie Robert Wright went after me at lunch in Mexico.)  Dawkins?  He goes after religious beliefs like a pit bull, but have you ever see him be contemptuous to an believer unless she’s repeatedly shown willful ignorance? (Remember Dawkins getting mad at the woman who, refusing to look at hominin fossils, kept maintaining that humans hadn’t evolved?).  Stenger?  He’s firm but polite.  Bill Maher?  He’s a comedian, for crying out loud, and in Religulous he let the faithful mock themselves.  Eric MacDonald?  Give me a break—he’s as gentle as an atheist can be.  Hitchens is a likely candidate, but, recently rereading God is Not Great, I found far more attacks on ideas than on people.

I applaud Aikin and Talisse for writing a book that diagnoses faith as an error.  As they say, “We affirm in Reasonable Atheism that we believe that distinctively religious beliefs are false, and that religious believers are therefore wrong.” But why the failure to be explicit about those atheists who have a). accused them of accommodationism or b) pulled a Tom Johnson on the faithful?

I’m at a loss to understand these many atheists who say that they have “a little list”, but, like Joe McCarthy, refuse to divulge it.  Are they trying to protect the guilty, who are, after all, fellow atheists? Somehow I don’t think that’s the answer.  Perhaps the answer is this:  while Gnu Atheists may sometimes descend to mockery, they spend far more time going after religious belief than after believers.   That’s why the lists always come down to anonymous commenters on Pharyngula who suggest that the faithful perform sexual acts with rusty knives.

Perhaps Aikin and Talisse will come over here and give us their little list.  I hope so.  I’d like to see who among us is guilty of continual and contemptuous verbal assaults on the faithful.   And let’s not have a few statements taken out of context, either. How about showing, among Gnus, the ratio of invective devoted to attacking the faithful themselves as opposed to attacking their beliefs?

Some people just don’t get it

February 7, 2011 • 2:50 pm

When the topic of the antagonism between science and religion arises, people who seem reasonably intelligent suddenly seem to lose some neurons.  We saw an example earlier today with Elaine Ecklund, who appears to have become a Templeton-funded automaton, endlessly repeating false mantras of accommodationism.

Now writer Lauri Lebo has fallen victim as well.  She’s incensed about a piece by fellow Post writer Julia Duin, who, observing in an On Faith column that one in eight high school biology teachers rejects evolution, notes that:

Evolution runs directly counter to most major world religions, which teach that God created the world in some form or another.

Duin’s point was that there is considerable “mainstream” opposition to evolution, including Speaker of the House John Boehner’s belief that creationism should be taught in school.

And boy did this tick Lebo off!  Writing at Religious Dispatches, she furiously demands that Duin retract her statement about the opposition of faith and religion:

Really? Just off the top of my head I can think of a few major religions that have no trouble reconciling evolution with faith, including Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, and all non-fundamentalist versions of Protestantism, such as, for instance, the United Methodist Church.

Lebo then consulted Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project, asking for his take.  Of course Zimmerman agreed with her:

Although some claim that evolution is at odds with the beliefs of most religions, the truth is very different from that perspective. If you look at the basic tenets of the world’s religions, as Joel Martin has in his book The Prism and the Rainbow, you’ll see that religions and denominations representing a large majority of adherents across the globe are fully comfortable with evolution. Similarly, The Clergy Letter Project, with its more than 13,000 American clergy from various traditions, fully demonstrates how deeply religious individuals can be fully comfortable with their faith and the basic principles of modern science. The perspective that evolution must be rejected by those who are religious is nothing more than an oft repeated myth, promoted by some who want to advance both their political causes and their narrow religious perspective. For so many others, the wonders of evolutionary theory in particular and the amazing discoveries of science in general have served to deepen their religious faith.

And, in a high dudgeon, Lebo finally demands that Duin retract her entire piece:

I sincerely hope Washington Post’s religion editors take note of Duin’s factual inaccuracy, which cries out for a correction. A newspaper of the Post’s reputation owes far more to its readers than to print blog posts of different viewpoints to generate buzz, without regard to the facts. Duin’s just-so assertion, which was not backed up by a shred of evidence, shows a woeful lack of understanding of her beat, and insults the beliefs of the countless people of faith she so casually dismissed.

The problem, of course, is distinguishing between the views of “religion”—which I guess Lebo (along with Zimmerman) sees as the official position of church officials and theologians—and the views of religious people themselves.

There are two points to be made here.  First, even the “tolerant” official views of religion can be anti-science.  While the Catholic church officially accepts evolution, it accepts theistic evolution, in which God guided the process and casually slipped an immortal soul into the hominin lineage.  And theistic evolution, in which God has a role in the process, is not acceptance of evolution as we biologists understand it.  So yes, the true biological view of evolution as a materialistic, unguided process is indeed at odds with most religions.  Organizations that promote evolution, such as the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), prefer to avoid this critical point: all they care about is that evolution get taught in the schools, not whether believers wind up accepting the concept of evolution as it’s understood by scientists.  (If all they want is evolution to be taught, that, I suppose is fine. But it’s not fine if they want public understanding of evolution.)

Second, if you construe “religion” as “what religious people believe,” then there certainly is opposition to evolution among members of all religions.  For example, despite the position of their church, many Catholics adhere to the form of young-earth creationism accepted by 40% of Americans.   That 40% does not comprise only Bible-waving fundamentalist Protestants.

When we’re totting up resistance to evolution, then, we have to do more than look at official church positions: we have to see what religious people actually think.   And we should stop claiming that theistic evolutionists are fully on the side of science, because they aren’t.  They’re on the side of the angels (whose existence, by the way, is accepted by 75% of Americans).  These theists see evolution as involving miracles at one point or another.

Only about 20% of Americans agree both that humans evolved and that this process wasn’t guided by God.  If you’re a naturalist, those are our real allies.  The rest are what Anthony Grayling calls “supernaturalists.”

What’s new about the Gnus

February 7, 2011 • 9:05 am

Over at Choice in Dying, Eric MacDonald, ex-Anglican priest, offers his take about why the New Atheism is new.  As expected, he’s exercised about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s frantic call for Anglicans to pwn New Atheists.  Be sure to read Eric’s whole post; I’ve put just a few excerpts here:

What we think is there is no confident knowledge of ultimate reality to be had. It even wonders whether there is a decent use for that word ‘ultimate’ until someone has spotted it, and has given us some reason for thinking it ultimate (whatever Shook takes ‘ultimate’ to mean). Indeed, this is just where I see the newness in the New Atheists. We no longer think it makes sense to speak in terms of ultimacy. What would ultimate reality look like if we found it? There’s no way of telling, because one person’s ultimate reality is another person’s mystery. And mystery, whatever else it is, does not even suggest reality. It just means that we don’t know. . .

. . And this is also why the kind of thing that Jerry Coyne objects today about the American Association for the Advancement of Science getting involved in accommodation with religious beliefs is a particular concern of the New Atheism. As we know from so many attacks on New Atheism, this concern about accommodationism is taken as evidence of New Atheism’s intransigence and stridency; but it’s really about protecting the realm of the rational from contamination.

I always sound so much smarter when Eric paraphrases me!

His stirring close (I like the title of the book!):

It is, I think, significant that the Archbishop of Canterbury should speak about the New Atheism. He suggests that this is an intolerant form of atheism. It is certainly, at least, on his radar screen. But what he says is simply wrong, and the archbishop has misunderstood. What seems to him to be intolerance is a fairly new and fairly blunt claim, and that is that there is simply no basis at all for making the metaphysical or moral claims that religions make. We are not saying that there is insufficient evidence, but that we have seen no evidence on which to base religious claims. Religion has human fingerprints all over it, but so far no one has come close to showing that there might be more than this world and ourselves in it, with all the other animals, plants and inanimate objects of which is composed. We may always, with good reason, since this is the way reason works, keep an open mind about this. It may be that in time to come, evidence will be found which will indicate that the New Atheism was all a mistake, and, if there are any of us left, we will have, abjectly, to apologise; but none of us really thinks this is a remote possibility, and most would probably be willing to write a book with the title: Why Atheism is True. And that, gentle readers, is why it is new.