Rosenhouse vs. Mooney

June 6, 2009 • 6:03 am

Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse has responded to Mooney’s “part two” critique of my views on accommodationism.  It’s a superb analysis, and, as before, I couldn’t have written it better myself.  If you’ve been following these debates, this is required reading.

As I said yesterday, I’ll wait until Mooney finishes his posts before I reply in one final salvo.  But just a note or two in passing.

First, it’s refreshing to see someone who’s actually read what I had to say about accommodationism.  Mooney says he’s read my New Republic screed on this, but he doesn’t seem to have grasped it.  He gets my views on philosophical vs. methodological naturalism completely wrong; Rosenhouse gets them right.  Likewise, as I’ve said ad nauseum, not every form of faith is incompatible with science.  In my New Republic article, I claim that pure deism (which accepts a hands-off God who doesn’t intrude into the workings of the Universe) is absolutely compatible with science.  The problem is that hardly anybody is a pure deist.  It’s when you get into theistic faiths — those in which Gods tweaks the world from time to time — that we find the incompatibilities.  Rosenhouse understands this; Mooney apparently does not.

About court cases:  yes, judges can state that evolution is compatible with some faiths, but they needn’t accept this to ban the teaching of creationism.  Perhaps the most cogent legal decision ever levied against creationism was that of Judge William R. Overton in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, the famous 1982 decision in which Overton threw out a “balanced treatment” law promoted by creationists.  As far as I can see, Overton says exactly nothing about accommodationism. His decision was made, as legal decisions have always been made in the last several decades, on the basis of the Lemon test of whether a law or statute violates the First Amendment.   As Overton notes, a law that threatens the Establishment Clause is constitutional only under the following conditions:

First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion …; finally, the statute must not foster “an excessive government entanglement with religion.” [ Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. at 40.]

This says nothing about whether religion and science have to be compatible before creationism is thrown out.  On the contrary:  if creationism violates the above statutes, it’s unconstititional, period.

By the way, the peroration of Overton’s decision still moves me every time I read it:

The application and content of First Amendment principles are not determined by public opinion polls or by a majority vote. Whether the proponents of Act 590 constitute the majority or the minority is quite irrelevant under a constitutional system of government. No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others.

The Court closes this opinion with a thought expressed eloquently by the great Justice Frankfurter:

We renew our conviction that “we have stake the very existence of our country on the faith that complete separation between the state and religion is best for the state and best for religion.” Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. at 59. If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, “good fences make good neighbors.” [McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203, 232 (1948)]An injunction will be entered permanently prohibiting enforcement of Act 590.

Finally, in case you missed it, Joshua Slocum posted the following on both my site and Richard Dawkins’s.  It’s worth repeating here.

Posted June 5, 2009 at 8:55 pm

Cross-posted from Richard Dawkin’s site. For context, I’m responding to a commentor who noted that years of accomodationism simply haven’t worked, but robust confrontation of the positions of the religious is actually opening up the conversation.

I wrote:

All this nervous nellie simpering over people being “rude” or “confrontational” to the intellectually deluded (I’m talking to you, Ken Miller) reminds me of the years I spent listening to this same argument over gay rights:

“Well, see, some people, um, just can’t accept you, so, um, it’s so much better not to push them. I mean, if you’re deferent enough, they won’t feel threatened, and they won’t vote against you having equal rights. Just don’t be too flamboyant, mm’kay? And, really, don’t push your points too hard – even though you’re logically and ethically correct, they just can’t handle it, and they’ll shut down.

Isn’t it so much nicer just to get along quietly, and accept their largesse for allowing you to exist, without forcing them to be grown-ups who face the intellectual and moral consequences of their public pronouncements?”

Hell no it isn’t.

And you’re absolutely right, [commentor]: it’s *precisely* about short-term political expediency. Mooney knows that, and if he doesn’t, he’s fooling himself and compartmentalizing his views so he doesn’t have to face them. Maybe because it’s easier to get along with his friends on the accomodationist end of the spectrum, who make their bread and butter splitting the baby.

This whole issue is so baffling. How can so many very intelligent people (Mooney is among them, you can’t take that away from him) blithely go along acting as if there’s something so peculiar, so special, about American discourse that we cannot, ever, ever, ever, get over our special pleading for religion? Why do they think America, as a society, is incapable of moving on the way most of Europe has? Why are they so content with – so insistent on maintaining – the pessimistic view that America will always be burdened with this intellectual handicap?

One could say something similar about the civil rights movement of the sixties.  I was there, and clearly remember people telling activists not to make a lot of noise because it would be counterproductive, alienating those who were sympathetic.  Now accommodationists like Mooney tell us the same thing about religion. Bosh.  I am absolutely confident that some time in the distant future, we will put away our childish things and religion will disappear in America.  To those like Mooney who say that this is ridiculous, I point to Europe, where religion in all but the formal sense is almost gone.  Have a look at Society Without God, by Phil Zuckerman — a sociological study of how Denmark and Sweden have become almost atheistic countries, but retain their social conscience, morality, and many good things we don’t have in the US.

There have been so many cogent replies to Mooney — on this site, on Richard Dawkins’s site, on Mooney’s own site, and on Jason’s site — that I hardly need to reply personally.  It’s good to know there is a lot of clear thinking out there.

The face of — in the dirt!

June 5, 2009 • 9:55 am

I had my first “supernatural” experience this morning.  While walking to work, I saw this pattern in the dirt at the bottom of the steps up to my building.  I stopped dead and took a photo.  Now it can’t be the face of Jesus because there are no whiskers (as we all know, Jesus had a beard), so who is it?  To me it looks like Virginia Woolf.

DSCN2836

Woolf right

The evolution of laughter

June 5, 2009 • 8:55 am

Laughter appears to be a “human universal”: one of those many traits that Donald Brown, in his book Human Universals, found in every society.  Well, does that mean it is a trait that evolved in our ancestors, or did it merely appear as a cultural phenomenon early in human society, and spread to all other societies?  One bit of evidence is that children who are deaf and blind, and thus can’t see or hear other people laughing, still laugh.  This suggests (but of course does not prove) that it is an innate, genetically coded trait, though it says nothing about whether it might have been an adaptive trait.

New research just reported in Current Biology by Davila Ross et al. (see here for a short BBC summary of the work; be sure to click on the video to see a gorilla “laughing”!) suggests that laughter is at least an evolved phenomenon, for our relatives appear to show similar vocalizations when tickled, and our closer relatives show more similar vocalizations.

Davila Ross et al. tickled 3 human infants, 7 orangutas, 5 gorillas, 4 chimpanzees, 5 bonobos (pygmy chimps) and 1 siamang, recording their vocalizations. (What a great job!)  Acoustic analysis of the vocalizations produced a phylogeny, or “family tree” of their similarities.  Strikingly, the family tree based on “tickle-vocalization” analysis is congruent with the known phylogeny based on DNA analysis:

laffs

Importantly,  the authors note that several features of human laughter, like its rapid “ha ha ha” type of vocalization, and its expression only during “egressive airflow” (science-ese for “breathing out”) are found in our relatives as well.

So laughter, at least when being tickled, appears to be an evolved, innate phenomenon.  As I emphasized above, this says nothing about whether it was selected for directly, whether it was a byproduct of something else that was selected, or is simply a nonadaptive epiphenomenon.  But as I write, evolutionary psychologists are working on why evolution may have promoted laughter.  Stay tuned.

Did Chris Mooney tell me to shut up?

June 5, 2009 • 6:49 am

Well, Chris Mooney has decided to continue the discussion about the compatibility of science and faith that he and Barbara Forrest began on his Discover blog.  If you’ve followed all this, they criticized me for my “divisiveness” in going after the idea that science and faith are compatible.  I responded to this, saying that since Forrest and Mooney apparently agreed with my views (and my atheism), they were in effect telling me to shut up — imposing upon me (and some of my colleagues) a form of intellectual censorship.  I also pointed out that in 2001 Mooney published a pretty strong piece criticizing faith/science accommodation — a piece diametrically opposed to the views he espouses now.

Mooney responded that he had indeed changed his mind, and has become much more of an accommodationist:

…indeed, I find my work from 2001 on this topic pretty unsatisfying. I guess you could say I’ve changed my view; certainly I’ve changed my emphasis. A lot more reading in philosophy and history has moved me toward a more accomodationist position. So has simple pragmatism; I don’t see what is to be gained by flailing indiscriminately against religion, other than a continuation of the culture wars. That’s especially so when those who flail against religion do so in philosophically or historically unsophisticated ways, or (worse still) with the bile, negativity, and even occasional intolerance that I have encountered in such discussions.

I wrote on Mooney’s blog that I was certainly not flailing indiscriminately against religion, and challenged him to find one example of where I’ve done that, or been uncivil to the faithful (another comment that he implicitly levelled at me).  My criticisms of accommodation have been specific: it waters down science and gives people a mistaken view of what science says. (One of these mistaken views is the widespread claim — viz. Kenneth Miller, Francis Collins, etc. — that the evolution of humans or human-like creatures was inevitable). This is hardly “flailing.”

Well, Mooney is now publishing a longer critique of what I said, and (oy vey!), he claims that it will be in two or more parts, and perhaps take several weeks.  My heart is sinking. Part I is here.

I will wait until Mooney publishes all of his several promised critiques of accommodationism before I respond, but let me take up one issue here.

Was Mooney telling me to shut up? Apparently stung by that suggestion, he denied it vehemently:

So although I shouldn’t have to, let me come out and say it: I believe in freedom of speech and the value of dialogue and the open exchange of ideas. I have never argued that anybody ought to shut up, be quiet, etc. This simply wrong.

Nobody wants anybody to shut up. This is America. Etc.

But of course he was telling me to shut up!  Despite his denial, it’s palpably clear that Mooney (and by extension, Barbara Forrest), was advising me to lie low and let the accommodationists address the compatibility of science and faith.  (In this he joins the AAAS, the National Academies of Science, and the National Center for Science Education).  Rather than repeat what all of Mooney’s posters have agreed on, which is that he was telling me to put a sock in it because my words were “divisive”, let me just steer you to the excellent analysis by Jason Rosenhouse on his EvolutionBlog.  A sample (read the whole thing on his site because there’s a lot more):

Moving on, let’s look a bit more closely at what exactly Coyne did to bring Mooney and Forrest down upon him. He published a book review. In The New Republic. In this review he did not level a single ad hominem attack and praised certain aspects of what Miller and Giberson have done. He then went on to criticize their ideas. Mooney himself, in his follow-up post, wrote

So-I have recently reread Jerry Coyne’s lengthy New Republic piece, which is at the source of some of our debates; and let me say, it is a very good, extensive, thoughtful article.Are you seriously telling me that is poor tactics? A very good, thoughtful, extensive book review in a high-level venue like TNR is just too much for those poor, delicate liberal Christians to handle? Please. Any Christian who has genuinely made his peace with evolution is not going to be driven to the other side because Jerry Coyne offered a few contrary thoughts.

The whole thing is reminiscent of that Jerome Bixby short story “It’s a Good Life” (later made into a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone). That’s the one with the three-year old who has God-like powers, but lacks any sense of judgment or conscience. Whenever someone does something he doesn’t like, the kid simply wills something terrible to happen to that person. Everyone has to go around thinking happy thoughts all the time, because happy thoughts are relaxing to the kid. And everytime the kid throws a tantrum everyone has to say things like, “It’s very good that you did that. We’re all so happy you turned Mr. Smith into that terrible thing.”

That’s what I think of whenever I read essays like Mooney’s. Liberal Christians are playing the role of the kid. Coyne et al are in the role of those doing things the kid doesn’t like. And Mooney et al are in the role of those trying to soothe the kid. “Mr. Coyne didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. It’s very good that you believe religious clerics and holy texts have something valuable to tell us about the workings of nature…”

In one of his follow-up posts Mooney bristled at the idea that he is telling Coyne, in effect, to shut up. Mooney writes

So although I shouldn’t have to, let me come out and say it: I believe in freedom of speech and the value of dialogue and the open exchange of ideas. I have never argued that anybody ought to shut up, be quiet, etc. This simply wrong. Nobody wants anybody to shut up. This is America. Etc.

No, he didn’t argue that Coyne should shut up. He only argued that writing a very good, thoughtful, extensive article for The New Republic was evidence of how woefully misguided Coyne is about strategy. Which raises the question: where should Coyne have expressed his views? If even a relatively tame article in a high-level venue like TNR is too much for liberal Christians, then what could Coyne have done, short of shutting up, that would have mollified them?

I couldn’t have said it better, so I won’t.  Thanks, Jason, for saving me the trouble.

I don’t want to belabor this “he said/he said” stuff about shutting up, but Mooney’s bizarre denial of what he really said doesn’t bode well for future discourse.  And I’m a bit wary because I don’t think I have much more to say about accommodationism than what I’ve already said on this website or in my New Republic piece.

Awwgasm: European wildcats

June 4, 2009 • 10:17 am

Last week we discussed the evolution of the domestic cat, which apparently evolved (or was selected) from a population of the wildcat, Felis silvestris, inhabiting the Middle East.  Here are a mother and kittens of the European wildcat (same species), taken only yesterday in Germany’s Opel Zoo. Photo courtesy of ZooBorns.Eur wildcati

(P.Z. and I are on a campaign to show that we’re really softies underneath and that not all atheists are hateful and grumpy curmudgeons.)

Eur wildcat

Gay penguins rear adopted chick

June 4, 2009 • 8:25 am

Just in time to bolster the gay marriage movement in the US comes this report from the BBC about how two “gay” male Humboldt penguins in Germany incubated a fertilized egg and are rearing the offspring:

The zoo made headlines in 2005 over plans to “test” the sexual orientation of penguins with homosexual traits.

Three pairs of male penguins had been seen attempting to mate with each other and trying to hatch offspring from stones.

The zoo flew in four females in a bid to get the endangered birds to reproduce – but quickly abandoned the scheme after causing outrage among gay rights activists, who accused it of interfering in the animals’ behaviour.

The six “gay” penguins remain at the zoo, among them Z and Vielpunkt who are now rearing the chick together after being given the rejected egg.

“Z and Vielpunkt, both males, gladly accepted their ‘Easter gift’ and got straight down to raising it,” said a zoo statement.

“Since the chick arrived, they have been behaving just as you would expect a heterosexual couple to do. The two happy fathers spend their days attentively protecting, caring for and feeding their adopted offspring.”

This will undoubtedly incite all kinds of kerfuffles, but I for one am grateful that the egg and chick got proper care.  One quibble: the zoo said the following

“Homosexuality is nothing unusual among animals,”

“Sex and coupling up in our world do not necessarily have anything to do with reproduction.”

Au contraire: sex and coupling in our world have everything to do with reproduction, as do all adaptations.  We also have to remember that “gay” behavior in animals may have little to do with the phenomenon of homosexuality in humans. A while back I reviewed Joan Roughgarden’s attempt to analogize the two phenomena and, by so doing, to provide a natural “justification” for human homosexuality.  I claimed that homosexuality needed no such rationale, especially because if human and animal “gayness” are different, the justification vanishes.

Chris Mooney and Barbara Forrest love the faithful more than me

June 2, 2009 • 12:14 pm

Over on his Discover blog The Intersection, Chris Mooney (author of The Republican War on Science) and Barbara Forrest (philosopher of science and witness at the Dover trial) take me to task for not being sufficiently nice to the faithful, and assert that my criticism of science/faith accommodationism will alienate those liberal Christians who support evolution.  Mooney and Forrest have both done good work; his book is a trenchant analysis of the right’s attempt to dismantle good science in the U.S., and in the Dover trial Forrest did an absolutely terrific job of ripping apart the arguments of IDers that they weren’t creationists.  And both Forrest and Mooney are atheists.

But I think they are profoundly misguided in these criticisms of my views.  Indeed, they seem to have completely failed to grasp what I was saying.

When I first read this piece, and Mooney’s earlier criticism of my views, I did a double take. Was this the same Chris Mooney who in 2001 excoriated the PBS Evolution Series because it was too accommodating to faith (see his dissection in Slate, Darwin’s Sanitized Idea)?:

But PBS’s mainstreaming of Darwinism also trims back some of the theory’s more controversial implications. Evolution flatly denies equal time to Darwin’s religiously based rivals, Creationism and intelligent design theory, yet the program repeatedly argues that evolution and religion are compatible. If you eat Darwin’s theory for your main course, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and others seem to say, you can have religion for dessert. . .

. . . Evolution‘s attempt to divorce Darwinian science from atheism, though well intentioned, is finally naive. Darwinism presents an explanation for life’s origins that lacks any supernatural element and emphasizes a cruel and violent process of natural selection that is tough to square with the notion of a benevolent God. Because of this, many students who study evolution will find themselves questioning the religions they have grown up with. What’s insidious is that Evolution allows fundamentalists to say this, but not evolutionists. The miniseries interviews several experts who could be expected to oppose the reconciliation outlook, notably Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, who has written, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” But neither Dennett nor Dawkins gets much of a say on the topic of religion.

Well, I suppose Mooney has changed his mind, and has decided, along with Barbara Forrest, to cozy up to the faithful.  Let’s see what Forrest says about my views (Mooney agrees completely with her):

Forrest eloquently defended this view in the first half of her talk; but in the second, she also challenged the latest secularist to start a ruckus–Jerry Coyne, who [sic] I’ve criticized before. In a recent New Republic book review, Coyne took on Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson, two scientists who reconcile science and religion in their own lives. Basically, Forrest’s point was that while Coyne may be right that there’s no good reason to believe in the supernatural, he’s very misguided about strategy. Especially when we have the religious right to worry about, why is he criticizing people like Miller and Giberson for their attempts to reconcile modern science and religion?

Forrest then gave three reasons that secularists should not alienate religious moderates:

1. Etiquette. Or as Forrest put it, “be nice.” Religion is a very private matter, and given that liberal religionists support church-state separation, we really have no business questioning their personal way of making meaning of the world. After all, they are not trying to force it on anybody else.

2. Diversity. There are so many religions out there, and so much variation even within particular sects or faiths. So why would we want to criticize liberal Christians, who have not sacrificed scientific accuracy, who are pro-evolution, when there are so many fundamentalists out there attacking science and trying to translate their beliefs into public policy?

3. Humility. Science can’t prove a negative: Saying there is no God is saying more than we can ever really know empirically, or based on data and evidence. So why drive a wedge between religious and non-religious defenders of evolution when it is not even possible to definitively prove the former wrong about metaphysics?

It’s almost not worth my while responding to this, because the posters on Mooney’s site have already done such an effective job of it (read their comments!).  One of the first things I learned when I set up a website is that you can learn a lot from the posters, who are often thoughtful, intelligent, and take the time to both correct one’s misapprehensions and write careful, reasoned analysis of an initial post.  In this case, thoughtful analysis has worked against Mooney and Forrest.

Let’s first dispose of one argument: Mooney and Forrest’s implicit requirement that atheists should “make nice” with their religious, evolution-accepting opponents and never, ever criticize them.  Where in tarnation did this idea come from?  Why are newspaper columnists, politicians, and even grant reviewers allowed to criticize the ideas of their peers, but we scientist/atheists are not?  Why are we supposed to shut up and other analysts aren’t?  Let’s be clear here:

1.   I have never criticized an evolutionist, writer, or scholar in an ad hominem manner.  My New Republic review, which Forrest and Mooney find so odious, was temperate and respectful. In fact, of all the comments I’ve gotten on this piece, none of them until now have thought it intemperate.   I took care to point out the positive contributions of both Miller and Giberson, and characterized them as “thoughtful men of good will.”  Let me point out to Mooney and Forrest that my behavior and tone have been infinitely more polite than that of “liberal Christians” such as John Haught when confronted by godless evolutionists.  But of course Forrest and Mooney don’t worry about the epiphets heaped on people like Dawkins and myself by the faithful.  At any rate, I believe in civil discourse, but I don’t believe in acting respectful towards ideas that I find weak or odious.

2.  Apropos, my critique of accommodationism has always centered on one proposition:  the reconciliation of science and faith almost always dilutes science, especially evolution.  This was the main topic of my New Republic piece.  In it, I go to great lengths to show that popular forms of accommodationism, such as those expounded by Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson, require statements that are not supported by science. For example, many accommodationists argue that the evolution of humans was inevitable: that if we reran the tape of life, some God-fearing creature like H. sapiens, or some “humanoid” equally capable of apprehending its creator, would inevitably arise.  I don’t think science tells us this and, as far as I can see, my analysis was the first critique of this popular view.  It was the intellectual discussion of an idea.  Likewise, I criticized the “fine-tuning” argument for the existence of design, and pointed out (as many have before me) the disparity between the materialistic claims of religion (e.g., the Resurrection) and what we know about science.  These are intellectual dissections of intellectual arguments.  In claiming that I should refrain from such work, Forrest and Mooney are, I’m afraid, being anti-intellectual.  Regardless of whether they accept my analysis (and it seems that they do!), they have to admit that it was not an exercise in religion-bashing.  Even Mooney’s posters recognize this (see below).

As for whether I am engaged in “bad tactics” by criticizing our liberal religious friends who support evolution, let me point out, as I have many times before, the following facts.  Accommodationists like Forrest and the National Center for Science Education have been using the “let’s-make-nice-to-the-faithful” strategy for several decades.  What is the result? First, American acceptance of evolution has stayed exactly where it is for 25 years.  The strategy is not changing minds.  Second, the progress that has been made is not in changing minds, but winning court cases, as in Dover. However, winning those court cases does not require that we show that science and religion are compatible.  Rather, it requires showing that creationism and ID are forms of disguised religion.

There is also a strong negative correlation among countries between acceptance of Darwin and belief in God.  Countries with high belief in God, like Turkey and the US, have low acceptance of Darwinism. Countries like France, Sweden, and Denmark, which have high acceptance of Darwin, are not very religious.  Too, there is an obvious relationship between learning evolution and losing one’s faith.  All of this leads me to believe that the real problem with evolution in this country is not creationists, but religion.  You can have religion without creationism, but you never see creationism without religion.  I think, then, that we will only win this war by either vanquishing religion or waiting for it to disappear in the US, as it has in Europe.  There is real room for a discussion on tactics here, but Mooney and Forrest refuse to engage.  They’re just too fond of religion, apparently having what Daniel Dennett calls a “belief in belief.”

The implicit argument of Forrest and Mooney is that I should be spending my time attacking creationism and ID rather than criticizing our “friends.” Well, I’ve been doing the former for 25 years, and I’ll put my record up against that of either Mooney or Forrest in the fight against creationism. (See an earlier article I wrote on ID for The New Republic.) I’ve been writing and speaking against creationism since I got my first job.

Finally, as the posters at Mooney’s site have noticed, often religion is not a private matter.  Religious people are often trying to force their faith-driven agendas down our throats, and so it is perfectly acceptable to “question their personal way of making meaning of the world.”  And, as Richard Dawkins has pointed out (and I believe him), religious “moderates” often act as enablers of religious extremists.  The failure to criticize the excesses of Islam, for example, can largely be laid at the door of our friends the liberal Christians.

So much for “etiquette.” What about “diversity”?  Well, I have repeatedly criticized fundamentalists of all stripes, including Orthodox Jews and Muslims (a year ago I was in Turkey lecturing on Harun Yahya and Islamic fundamentalism).  I am an equal-oppportunity critic.  Forrest and Mooney are just wrong that I single out liberal Christians for criticism. And they’re wrong in saying that liberal Christians “have not sacrificed scientific accuracy” in their support of evolution.  People like Miller and Giberson have indeed sacrificed such accuracy, giving the public the false impression that science actually supports the idea of a God.  Every time they make the fine-tuning argument, every time they claim that science shows that human evolution is inevitable, they are “sacrificing scientific accuracy.”

And as for humility, well, I don’t see much humility coming from the liberal Christians, who assert without reasons that there is a God.   And although we cannot prove a negative, I doubt whether Mooney or Forrest would give much credibility to those who worship tree spirits, Zeus, or John Frum.  Certainly we can show that the world does not comport with the kind of world we’d expect to see if it were run by an omnipotent, omniscient, and loving god.  Humility?  Yes, I don’t know if there is a God, but the evidence is against it.  In the meantime, I don’t assert that there is no God; I simply find no reasons to believe in one.

It’s a pity that Mooney and Forrest take such an anti-intellectual stance when they could be engaging in real discussion about whether science and faith are compatible. (In his earlier Slate piece, Mooney found them dead incompatible, and was not shy about saying so!)  In their desire to cozy up to Christians, they are trying to impose a form of intellectual censorship on the rest of us.  That is what you do when you’ve lost the argument about the compatibility of faith and science.  I’d take Forrest and Mooney more seriously if they’d deal with the arguments of scientists and theologians who, in their frenzy to accommodate faith and science, give a distorted view of science.

I’ll give the last word to a poster on Mooney’s site, one “Madcap”.  Whoever he/she is, this person has a far more accurate view of matters than do either Mooney or Forrest:

June 1st, 2009 at 3:43 am

Once again, it sounds like Mooney is taking Coyne (and others) to task for choosing reason and science over compromise and political sentiment.

Forrest even admits that Coyne (and presumably, the other “New Atheists” who are inevitably lumped together into one ideological unit) may be right in his assertions; but then rather than discuss or debate those assertions, castigates him for being ‘uncivil’ for daring to suggest that even most liberal theology has incompatibilities with science.

In fact, Coyne’s critique of the recent works by Giberson and Miller was anything *but* uncivil. On the contrary, I found it in-depth and insightful. Coyne went to lengths to explain what he did and did not like about their books in particular and their positions in general. Agree or disagree with Coyne’s point, I fail to see how he is being uncivil. I challenge Forrest and Mooney to find an example of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett being ‘uncivil’ when discussing religion. (Hitchens, the most common bogeyman of the Christian apologists, is not a scientist.) In fact, the only incivilities I am witnessing here are coming from the likes of Mooney, who is more or less telling Coyne to shut up, for the second time.

Apparently, taking a scientifically-minded theist to task, no matter what the tone or strength of one’s argument, is ‘uncivil’ and impolitic. We must maintain, I suppose, a bunker mentality: the enemy of our enemy is our friend. Anyone paying lip-service to Darwinism must be welcomed as an ally in the great war against Intelligent Design. In the interest of ‘civility’, we must accommodate one version of creationism over another one.

Nevermind that ID has already been legally forbidden from our nation’s public schools; in this post-Dover world, you’re either with us or again’ us. Any creationist willing to ally with us against ID must be our friend, and anyone like Coyne who disagrees is a traitor to the cause. I wonder if, in the interests of science, Francis Galton would be equally welcomed into the fold.

This is the second article I know of in which, for purely political reasons, Mooney has decided to favor the theological side of the argument. If I’m reading Mooney correctly, the pro-evolution forces cannot afford any divisiveness, and that’s why vocal atheists like Coyne must either be quiet, or be called out. The irony appears to escape him.

Coyne previously called individuals with this mentality “accomodationists”. Given these unfair attacks against evolution’s most ardent defenders, I’m beginning to think a more appropriate term is “collaborationists”.