If you want anecdotes, here’s one. I’ve been corresponding with a gentleman who was a fundamentalist Christian but has left that faith and, subsequently, started to read about evolution. (I’m advising him on what to read.)  We started corresponding after he read Why Evolution is True, which he liked (but also pointed out a few errors, like the discrepant dates for H. erectus‘s disappearance).  He gave me permission to share his story, but anonymously since he’s not yet “come out.”  It shows, at least in this one case (it’s not unique; I’ve heard from people with similar tales), that the writings of “militant” New Atheists can not only help you give up your faith, but also turn you into a fan of evolution.  He writes:

I accepted evolution and took it for granted from about the age of ten. After college I became a born-again Christian, and accepted the Bible as the inerrant, infallible, and only inspired written Word of God. As a result, the only way to read Genesis was literally. In private conversation with a minister, he warned me not to refer to people as animals, which I had done in the sense of not-plants, in front of any other Christians, as they would think me an evolutionist and stop listening to anything else I might say. I regularly received the Institute for Creation Research’s propaganda, and eagerly sought confirmation of my worldview from Behe’s and Johnson’s books. I always maintained doubts in the back of my mind about the Young Earth view and the explanations of flood geology, but I couldn’t see any other way of reading Genesis that preserved a real Adam and Eve, and a real Noah, all of whom Jesus and the apostles were recorded in the New Testament regarding as actual historical figures.

After decades immersed in this, I was persuaded by some ex-Protestants that the evangelical doctrine of sola scriptura (the Bible alone is a Christian’s final authority) was a recent, therefore human, invention. We should be subject to the Church, not a book. Except that a quick look at history readily shows how errant, fallible, uninspired, human, and downright corrupt the Church was! I tried to rebuild my faith in the Bible by reading all the Christian apologetics I could get my hands on, by heavyweight evangelicals like Michael Licona, William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, and popular writers like Josh McDowell and Lee Strobel.

While I was doing this, I was also reading the New Atheists. Some friends and I had been discussing atheism, when one of them said to me, “You’re very intelligent, and you always want evidence for everything. Why aren’t you an atheist?” So I decided for the first time to let the atheists state their case. Dawkins was rather disappointing, but Harris’s End of Faith was devastating. I tried burying myself in apologetics as an antidote, but then I came across critical biblical scholar Bart Ehrman. I started reading about the Bible instead of just reading the Bible. I read scholars’ explanations for the contradictions and discrepancies filling the Bible. Soon my faith was all but destroyed. The New Atheists + modern biblical scholarship = infidel.

Once that happened, the only thing keeping me from believing in evolution again was ID. Even if I couldn’t trust Genesis anymore to be an accurate account of creation, Behe’s arguments about intelligent design in light of irreducible complexity stayed with me. I previewed a few books online, read some customer reviews, checked my book club and saw that they carried your book, then selected it as this month’s choice. So here we are!

He’s now engaged in a program of reading evolution books like Your Inner Fish and Climbing Mount Improbable.

Many thanks to this person for sharing his story.

Over at Pennmachine.com, Derek Miller reviews and discusses the evidence-for-evolution books by the Three Donkeymen: Neil Shubin, Richard Dawkins, and me.

Nightline ran an 18-minute exposé of Scientology last week, and I’ve posted it in its entirety below.  For those who have followed this “faith,” the stuff about church leader David Miscavige won’t come as a surprise, but there are two nice bits: Miscavige’s announcement (3:15, video 1) of L. Ron Hubbard’s death discarding his body because his “research” was done, and a description (4:55, video 1) of how Miscavige had a Scientology jacket made for his beagle (complete with epaulets and stripes of rank), forcing other Scientologists to salute the uniformed dog.

An online AtlanticWire piece describes the bizarre end of the taping, which, sadly, doesn’t appear on these videos:

. . . on Friday, the dynamic was reversed. It was ABC Nightline reporter Martin Bashir who started it, hounding [Scientology spokesman Tommy] Davis with the question: “Do you believe that a galactic emperor called Xenu brought his people to earth 75 million years ago and buried them in volcanoes?” When Bashir persisted, Davis yanked his microphone and stormed off the set. Since then, Davis has apparently returned to ABC headquarters in New York when the interview was about to be aired, presumably to halt the program, and was sent packing by network security.

UPDATE:  You can now see the Xenu part! It turns out that ABC news did another part of this piece on Oct. 24.  There are five more parts available on YouTube, but check out this piece.  The trouble with Xenu begins at about 2:45. Watch Tommy Davis squirm and stonewall when Lord Xenu is brought up, and then stalk off the set.

We will have blogging: P.Z., who decided at the last minute to attend, has promised to either live-blog or provide evening data dumps.  The University of Chicago has also arranged for live blogging.  Jeremy Manier, our news director, forwarded this information:

Rob Mitchum, a neurobiology PhD from here who’s been going a great job on our Science Life blog, will also be live-blogging Darwin/Chicago, with an assist from me here.  Right now he’s featuring a good interview with Bob Richards on the event.

You should also know that the library here has posted a cool multimedia page on the 1959 conference here.   It includes video and audio from the conference and even audio from a daffy Darwin musical that was written for the event (my favorite is the song “Trilobite”).

We also have a web feature that details the historical links.

As I mentioned in a comment, we’ve arranged to have every presentation filmed, so I expect that you’ll be able to see them all on the Darwin/Chicago website before too long.

If you read Spanish and are bored, here’s my interview with the Guatemalan newspaper el Periódico, which, I’m told, is an independent and influential periodical.  If you aren’t fluent, here’s the Google translator version converted by someone into (broken) English, with the endearing title, “There is no missing links because they have been found.”  And I can’t vouch for the veracity of the Spanish translation since I gave the interview in English!

h/t: Giancarlo Ibarguen

Randy Cohen, who writes The Ethicist column in The New York Times, has a piece in today’s paper about the politeness of discussing faith.   His verdict?  Take it on:

Yet despite the risk of provoking the ire of believers, we should discuss the actions of religious institutions as we would those of all others — courteously and vigorously. This is a mark of respect, an indication that we take such ideas seriously. To slip on the kid gloves is condescending, akin to the way you would treat children or the frail or cats. . .

. . . My political beliefs, my ideas about social justice, are as deeply held as my critics’ religious beliefs, but I don’t ask them to treat me with reverence, only civility. They should not expect me to walk on tiptoe. It is not as if religious institutions occupy a precarious perch in American life. It is not the proclaimed Christian but the nonbeliever who is unelectable to high office in this era when politicians of every party and denomination make a public display of their faith.

I’m not sure what he means by “taking such ideas seriously.” If he means “accepting that the ideas may be credible,” I disagree.  By now we all know whether we find the assertions of religion credible, and yet we continue to argue about them when they’re not.  If  by “seriously” he means “realizing that these ideas have a real impact on society,” then I’m with him.

Cohen also has a few words about media coverage of the Vatican’s attempt at Anglican-poaching:

And so it is disheartening that the editorial pages of our most important newspapers did not castigate the Vatican’s invitation to misogyny and homophobia. Some blogs did so. Daily Kos headlined its coverage, “Vatican Welcomes Bigoted Anglicans.” But the discussion provided by, say, network news barely rose above the demure. That’s not courtesy; it’s cowardice.

A nice piece by a guy who can hardly be called “militant.”

h/t: Butterflies and Wheels

Over at Slate, Christopher Hitchens describes what he’s learned from his debates with folks like Douglas Wilson (apparently a repugnant character):

Wilson isn’t one of those evasive Christians who mumble apologetically about how some of the Bible stories are really just “metaphors.” He is willing to maintain very staunchly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and that his sacrifice redeems our state of sin, which in turn is the outcome of our rebellion against God. He doesn’t waffle when asked why God allows so much evil and suffering—of course he “allows” it since it is the inescapable state of rebellious sinners. I much prefer this sincerity to the vague and Python-esque witterings of the interfaith and ecumenical groups who barely respect their own traditions and who look upon faith as just another word for community organizing. . .

. . . Thanks to the foolishness of the “intelligent design” faction, which has tried with ignominious un-success to smuggle the teaching of creationism into our schools under a name that is plainly stupid rather than intelligent, and thanks to the ceaseless preaching of hatred and violence against our society by the fanatics of another faith, as well as other related behavior, such as the mad attempt by messianic Jews to steal the land of other people, the secular movement in the United States is acquiring a confidence that it has not known in years, while many of those who put their faith in revelation and prophecy and prayer are feeling the need to give an account of themselves.

Our big University of Chicago DarwinFest, organized by Bob Richards, Neil Shubin and me, starts this Thursday and goes through Saturday evening. It features a glittering panoply of biologists, philosophers, and historians of science, reprising the famous U of C conference of 1959.

Our formal registration is full up, with 600 people having plunked down their fee, but we’ll still accept some walk-ins. The website is here and the program is here. I’ll report as much as I can consistent with my helping run the thing. In the meantime, here’s the schedule for the plenary session at Rockefeller Chapel this Thursday evening (Lewontin was my Ph.D. advisor).

6:00 p.m. Welcome by Robert Zimmer, President of the University of Chicago

6:15 p.m. Richard Lewontin (Harvard University): “Genetic Determination and Adaptation: Two Bad Metaphors”

7:00 p.m. Ronald Numbers (U. of Wisconsin): “Anti-Evolutionism in America: Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design”

7:45 p.m. Marc Hauser (Harvard University): “From Where do Morals Come? NOT Religion!”

Here’s a snap of Julian Huxley at the plenary session in 1959, also at Rockefeller Chapel:

Fig. 1. Preaching to the choir.