Tag Archives: P.Z. Myers

Commentary

Do leading evolutionists think that evolution is compatible with God?

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Here is a post from Jerry Coyne’s blog: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/selective-creationists/. (H/T Retha from Christian Rethinker)

Coyne is a radical atheist and evolutionist. And he is also a very prominent biologist.

He writes:

Only a tad more than one in four teachers really accepts evolution as scientists conceive of it: a naturalistic process undirected by divine beings.  Nearly one in two teachers thinks that humans evolved but that God guided the process.

Can we count those 48% of “guided-by-Godders” 0n our side?  I agree with P. Z.: the answer is NO.  Yes, they do accept that our species changed genetically over time, but they see God as having pulled the strings.  That’s not the way evolution works.   The graph labels these 48% as believers in intelligent design, and that’s exactly what they are, for they see God as nudging human evolution toward some preconceived goal.  We’re designed.  These people are creationists: selective creationists.

To count them as allies means we make company with those who accept evolution in a superficial sense but reject it in the deepest sense.  After all, the big revolution in thought wrought by Darwin was the recognition that the appearance of design—thought for centuries to be proof of God—could stem from purely natural processes.   When we cede human evolution to God, then, we abandon that revolution.  That’s why I see selective creationists like Kenneth Miller, Karl Giberson and Francis Collins as parting company with modern biological thought.

Just to let you know, Ken Miller and Francis Collins do not think that science can perform experiments and detect that an intelligent cause is the best explanation for some effect in nature. They are committed to explaining every effect in nature as the result of natural processes, before they ever sit down in front of a microscope to look and see. That is their faith commitment – naturalism. I.e. – God didn’t do anything in nature that we can know about using objective measuring.

Theistic evolution versus atheism

Who was the foremost evangelical proponent of theistic evolution? Well, one of them was Howard Van Till of Calvin College. Why do I say “was”? Take a look at this event he did for a FREETHOUGHT group a while back.

Excerpt:

FROM CALVINISM TO FREETHOUGHT: The Road Less Traveled
by Howard J. Van Till

Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Emeritus
Calvin College
Presented 5/24/2006 for the Freethought Association of West Michigan
Lightly edited 5/26/2006

Precis: Born into a Calvinist family, shaped by a Calvinist catechism training, educated in the Calvinist private school system, and nurtured by a community that prized its Calvinist systematic theology, I was a Calvinist through and through. For 31 years my
teaching career was deeply rooted in the Calvinism I had inherited from my community.

During most of that time it was a fruitful and satisfying experience. Nonetheless, stimulated in part by the manner in which some members of that community responded to my efforts to practice what I had learned from my best teachers, I eventually felt the need to extend my intellectual exploration into philosophical territories far outside the one provided by Calvinism. Did I complete the lengthy journey from Calvinism to Freethought? The listener will be the judge.

Freethought is atheism, by the way.

I think that either God can interfere or he can’t. Theistic evolutionists and atheists think that he can’t intervene – at least not in a way that is independent of “faith” – by which they mean blind belief ungrounded by evidence. What theistic evolutionists are really saying is that God interferes where we can’t test in a lab (the resurrection), and he doesn’t interfere in the area that they can test in a lab (science). This allows them to appease their wives and churches with pronunciations of orthodox beliefs (of course I believe in miracles, honey), and also to appease their scientific colleagues (God didn’t do anything that we can know objectively). Well. Isn’t that convenient for them AND THEIR CAREERS as scientists?

Polemics

Are atheists just as moral as Judeo-Christian believers?

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Here’s a fine polemic from Michael Egnor, writing against radical atheistic Darwinist P.Z. Myers. (H/T ECM)

Myers’ views:

“I’m about as pro-choice as you can get…”

“…I’m even willing to say that I’m pro-abortion…”

“[I] would like to encourage more people to abort…”

And Egnor’s response: (in part)

Valerie Hudson and Andrea Den Boer, authors of the landmark book “Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population” ask:

What forces drive the deficit of females in Asian nations such as India and China? Why are their birth sex ratios so abnormal? Why are early childhood mortality rates for girls higher than those for boys? Why are most children in orphanages girls? How do we account for the disappearance of so many women — estimated conservatively at over 90 million missing women in seven Asian countries alone?

They conclude:

[T]he modern gender imbalance in Asia, as with historical gender imbalances in Asia and else-where, is largely a man-made phenomenon. Girls are being culled from the population, whether through prenatal sex identification and female sex-selective abortion, or through relative neglect compared to male offspring in early childhood (including abandonment)…

Pro-abortion population control policies are the foundation of this femicide, and Myers’ explicit embrace of abortion and implicit embrace of population control junk-science puts him in the company of thugs. Ironically, Myers’ fellow pro-abortion goons have violated women’s basic human rights — the right not to be sterilized, not to be forced to have an abortion, even the right to live until birth and the right not to be killed after birth because you’re a girl — on a scale unprecedented in human history. It’s no coincidence that the first women’s rights activists in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century were passionately pro-life and anti-abortion. Abortion and population control are primary instruments of femicide and of the worldwide degradation of women.

If a person is pro-abortion then they are necessarily pro-sex-selection-abortion.

Abortion is basically recreational sex followed by murder, in order to avoid having to deal with the demands of an innocent person who is at the mercy of the very people who freely chose to bring her into being. And yet atheists like P.Z. Myers want more abortions.

There is no place for human rights – of any kind – in an accidental universe. We are all just lumps of matter – machines made out of meat. That’s their view. We don’t even have consciousness or free will on their view. They think that we’re just animals acting out our biologically determined behaviors based on survival instincts. It’s a very low view of humans.

Here are some more famous atheists explaining what atheism is:

The idea of political or legal obligation is clear enough… Similarly, the idea of an obligation higher than this, referred to as moral obligation, is clear enough, provided reference to some lawgiver higher…than those of the state is understood. In other words, our moral obligations can…be understood as those that are imposed by God…. But what if this higher-than-human lawgiver is no longer taken into account? Does the concept of moral obligation…still make sense? …The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone. (Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985), p. 83-84)

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. (Source: Richard Dawkins)

The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate when someone says, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory. (Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-269).

Don’t make the mistake in thinking that an atheist is just like you because he lives in the same time and place as you and seems to act according to the fashions of the day. Atheists have no objective standard of morality. They think that “ought” statements are just arbitrary customs and preferences – like cooking style and clothing style and music style. It’s all arbitrary on their view. They think that people behave well not to conform to a Designer’s plan that values self-sacrificial love but in order to have happy feelings and to be accepted and praised by others. They think the universe is an accident, and the purpose of life is to compete with other people in order to be the happiest. There is no final judgment for anything they do, on atheism.

When a Christian loves someone self-sacrificially, they neither think of themselves, nor even the other person, but instead think of their relationship with God. We act out of the desire to please someone who loves us more than anyone in the world. The good action is basically done out of a desire to respect that prior vertical relationship. We are grateful, and we show our gratitude by imitating Jesus’ example of self-sacrificial love. The demands of a child, or a friend, or a family member are more important to me, as a Christian, than my own selfish happiness. I am more concerned about how my actions will cause someone to either turn to God or away from him. I would not act in a way that turns a person away from God. Even if it made me happy, even if I could get away with it. I just don’t care that much about being happy in this life. It’s not a big deal to me.

Commentary

MUST-READ: Follow up post by Michael Egnor on the New Atheism

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Remember my last post about the responses of atheist PZ Meyers to Michael Egnor’s eight questions for the New Atheists?

Well, some other “New Atheists” have responded and he decided to write a new post about one of the funniest ones.

The New Atheist in question answers the questions, but first he attacks Egnor for not allowing comments to the blog post, for being Roman Catholic, for being close-minded(?), and so on.

He then writes this:

The only “doctrine” inherent in “New Atheism” is a desire to observe a secular society and evidentialist arguments…Critical thinking is not conclusion and that’s where Egnor gets everything wrong.

In other words, he doesn’t have any answers to the questions!

Lest you think I am kidding, I will show his answers.

First, let’s review the questions:

  1. Why is there anything?
  2. What caused the Universe?
  3. Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
  4. Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?
  5. Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
  6. Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself?
  7. Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
  8. Why is there evil?

And now his answers:

I don’t know. Let’s use the scientific method and critical thinking to continue to try to figure it out and let’s leave religious presuppositions out of policy decisions so we don’t create legal inequality between belivers [sic] and non-believers.

That’s it. He only gave one answer. To all eight questions! He gave the same answer to all eight questions. “I don’t know”. My guess about his “policy” comments is that he is basically concerned that a majority of morality-enabled voters might put legal brakes on his selfish pursuit of happiness. E.g. – by passing laws defending the unborn or laws defending traditional marriage or laws protecting religious liberty, etc.

Anyway, if you want something funny to read, then you should definitely read this post. The funniest stuff is Egnor’s response to the New Atheist, and you have to click through to read that. I guarantee you will fall off your chair laughing. You readers think *I* am snarky and mean. You think *I* make fun of atheists for not being able to ground morality. Ha! Wait till you read Egnor. I’m *nice*.

We all need to get used to dealing with atheists this way. We need to bring their scientific, philosophical and moral deficiencies to the surface for all to see. And we must use questions to do it.

Atheists oppose science and evidence

Theists support science and evidence