More New Atheist Follies: P. Z. Myers tries to take on C. S. Lewis and the result is not pretty

Once again, the New Atheists have approached the black monolith of a philosophical argument, scratched their heads in mystification, and started jumping around in irritation. But unlike the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, they have come away from the experience completely unenlightened, the only benefit being that they got a little exercise.

This happens repeatedly: Some atheist scientist who's been fussing around with his Bunsen burner and test tube walks out of the laboratory and tries his hand at philosophy, thinking that the skills he acquired taking his biology degree somehow transfer over into the kind of conceptual analysis required in philosophy. Lawrence Krauss and Jerry Coyne are constantly embarrassing themselves by doing this.

This time it is P. Z. Myers, trying to make sense of C. S. Lewis' "Argument from Self-Destruction" (as it is termed by the Encylopedia of Philosophy). The argument is designed to show that the materialist position is self-defeating: If materialism is held to be true metaphysically, then it is false in reality.

Here is Lewis' statement, taken out of the context, of course, of the chapter in his book Miracles in which it appears, nevertheless sufficient:

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

Myers' response? "Then how could he write down such illogical inanity as this?" So we expect to hear some logically coherent response to it from the cocky Myers. Addressing the first three sentences, he says:

See, there’s his problem. Brains didn’t just happen. They aren’t merely some peculiar arrangement of atoms. They have a long contingent history in which they were shaped by selection to have particular properties that allowed bearers of slightly more functional nervous systems to outlive, outbreed bearers of cruder brains. An absence of a designer does not imply that the only other alternative is random chaos.

Myers apparently considers this a cogent response. Now first of all, how does it refute what Lewis says―that the brain is a mere arrangement of atoms―to say that the arrangement of atoms has a history? Of course arrangements of atoms have a history. Lewis doesn't deny it, in fact his whole point in this section of his book is that the materialist position is that any brain state is simply the effect of prior physical causes. Exactly why Myers thinks this is somehow in conflict with what Lewis is saying is a mystery. And why does he think the statement that brains are merely peculiar arrangements of atoms is inconsistent with those atoms having a history?

This is typical of New Atheist arguments: They just repeat some Just So story about how something came about and think that constitutes an explanation. In this case, it wouldn't matter if it did: It still doesn't address Lewis' point.

So, after jumping around in irritation at the first part and beating his hands on the ground, he tries to take on the second part:

First, you can’t trust your thinking to be true. You have to test and verify all the time. You can believe in thought without believing in gods: we all build empirical models of how the world works and test them constantly. From an early age, we noticed that when we dropped things they fell to the ground; when we learned to walk we stumbled and learned that we can fall to the ground, and it hurts; we learned that when we fell off the table it hurt a lot more than when we fell while standing on the ground. And now, when I look out my second floor window, I know jumping out of it would probably do me significant damage, despite never having actually tried it. 

Most of what we believe isn’t derived from the pure and perfect reasoning power of our flawless brains—it’s learned by trial and error by brains that are often afflicted with stubbornly bad ideas.

I'm sorry, but this response is so utterly bone-headed it's hard not to just dismiss it and go on the next bone-headed New Atheist pronouncement and the next one, ad infinitum. He literally doesn't understand what Lewis is saying.

Myers apparently thinks Lewis is trying to prove the existence of God with this argument, which, of course, he clearly is not. He's trying to show that the whole concept of truth―whether it's the truth of the position that God exists or the truth of the position that "you can't trust your thinking to be true"―is impossible on the materialist account of reality.

If your brain is merely an arrangement of atoms, then what can "truth" possibly mean? On what basis do we call one arrangement of atoms "true" and another "false"? The only basis on which we could privilege one over the other is if there is something above and beyond arrangements of atoms. But materialists don't believe in anything beyond arrangements of atoms―at least not if they're consistent materialists (there is another question).

The only atheists consistent on this point are the Platonist ones, like Bertrand Russell, who basically have to posit metaphysical entities. If there is such a thing as "truth," then it is metaphysical. But materialism denies the metaphysical. Therefore nothing, not even materialism can be "true."

That's why it's been called the "Argument from Self-Destruction": It's a description of how materialism defeats itself. It has nothing to do with proving God. You have to actually understand what somebody is saying in order to even argue against them. And Myer's doesn't even get that far.

I suggest he stick with arguing against thinkers more on his philosophical level, like Ken Ham. With Lewis, he's completely out of his water.

P.Z. Myers' Corrections Keep Rolling In

P.Z. Myers has corrected just about everything in his recent response except for his coprophagia. However, there are still two glaring errors left to fix.

1. P.Z. Myers claims that I am an intelligent design apologist. I am not. In fact I have written refutations of ID theory that date back to my college days. For example, in 2008 I wrote:

“ID theorists are guilty of procedural errors, and the scientific community has already focused on the specific scientific errors…. ID as an intellectual movement has its essence in ontological ambiguity and methodological error.”

2. P.Z. Myers thinks that Jerry Coyne did not make conclusions about David B. Hart's arguments in his book The Experience of God. Instead, Myers says, he made conclusions merely about reviewers of the book, which he had read, rather than Hart, who he had not read.

This too can be disproved by simple quotations. Here's Jerry Coyne, making conclusions about Hart's arguments:

• "Hart’s god, therefore, is immune to refutation."
• "Hart’s argument fails in the only way it can be tested."
• "Hart’s arguments are simply made-up stuff, and even though he’s smart and uses big words, there is no more evidence for his God than there is for the anthropomorphic Gods of Alvin Plantinga, Pat Robertson, and Rick Warren."
• "People like Hart, despite their intelligence, have no more handle on the nature of God than do Joe and Sally in the street."

But, on second thought, perhaps its best that P.Z. Myers not correct these mistakes. If he did, the only thing left would be his portrayal of his own coprophagia. Better factual errors, perhaps, than his revolting portrayal of his dietary adventures.

I deserve better insults than the ones coming from P.Z. Myers

So I respond to atheist scientist P.Z. Myers, who, on his blog got just about everything wrong about an article that my son Thomas wrote on this blog, including who actually wrote it. And after writing it, I am waiting expectantly for Myers to respond to me with some clever insult.

He likes insults: They're so much easier than arguments.

But you know, I'm down with a good insult. Even one at my expense. Insults are one good opportunity to prove your cleverness. I can appreciate a good insult like the next guy and I have been known to laugh uproariously at a well-fashioned insult hurled in my direction.

So I'm watching the comments section of Myers' post (which, by the way, has less need for a moderator than for a babysitter) and, oooh, here it comes: "He’s a creationist," says Myers in the comment section of his blog, "a right-wing nutcase, and proponent of patriarchal organizations who is so ashamed of who he is that he constantly denies it."

What? This is it? This is all I get? I haven't been insulted like that since the third grade.  I deserve better insults than this. No, take that back: I demand it. This insult is, to use an expression of a friend of mine, as "weak as puppy pee."

Is it too much to ask for, I don't know, some wit or something? Did Myers even put any effort into this? Is this really the best he can do? If we can't have wit, could we at least have smidgen of cleverness? Something?

If Myers can't give me anything better than this, I'm filing another complaint with the Bureau for Better Atheists, a group that monitors atheist quality and tries to maintain some semblance of rational and rhetorical integrity among the Unbelievers.

And let me tell you, that's not an easy job.

See the problem is this: Something appears to have gone wrong in the genetic atheist code from about the 1920s to now. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but something has happened to degrade the rhetorical abilities of atheist populations to the point that, if this degradation continues, atheists will shortly be capable only of monosyllabic grunts, groans and other audible but incoherent expressions.

In fact, if Myers' combox is any indication, we may already be there.

All I know is that the atheists of yore were far more developed in their rhetorical capabilities than their contemporary colleagues. How else to explain the fact that Meyers and Jerry Coyne and Laurence Krauss aren't even remotely in the same class as atheists like H. L. Mencken and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Just go back and read few lines of the old atheists and you'll get the sensation, going from the old to the New, of having fallen off an intellectual and rhetorical cliff.

Seriously, guys. You can do better than this. And I'm willing to help.

I propose remedial insult training: A clinic in contumely, a boot camp for barbs. Just think of it: Instead of simply employing bad manners or relying on primitive impudence or using expressions that the lack of having a mother who washed your mouth out with soap somehow made habitual, you could learn the art of the tactical wry comment and the subtle disparaging remark that your opponent will realize only later have cut him to pieces—longer, perhaps, if you use them on another atheist, who may never figure it out.

Seriously. You need to put down the blunt instruments and learn how to use something a little more sophisticated.

Get on the stick here.

P.Z. Myers, Coprophagist

A blogger named P.Z. Myers has responded to my article on Jerry Coyne. He begins by getting the author wrong, and things don't get better from there.

According to Myers, I was wrong to say that Coyne had criticized David B. Hart's arguments in The Experience of God—which Coyne admitted he had not read. Instead, Coyne was responding to "the ideas that other fans of Hart have promoted."

Myers must be a devotee of the coynian method (that is, the method of criticism by which one imagines what another has written instead of reading it). Had he actually read Coyne, he would have discovered that Coyne explicitly stated that Hart's argument for God is "immune to refutation" and therefore that "Hart's argument fails."

PZ Myers then recounts a series of coprophagic fantasies. Really. I do not share Myers' tastes, and I will leave it to the hardy reader to decide whether to read the more odious portions of Myers' post. (This certainly does not help the fact that Myers' blog seems to already have a reputation as a sewer.)

I have to add, again, that I am not trying to tar the whole atheist tradition with whatever one might find stowed away in the back of one of Myers' drawers. Myers would be just as lost in the works of sophisticated atheists (say, Gilles Deleuze or J.L. Mackie) than he is in the works of philosophical theology. As a taxonomic matter, one should not regard Coyne and Myers as belonging to the same species as Nietzsche or Feuerbach, but as distant and much less evolved second cousins.

Myers' is not a household name like Dawkins or Hitchens, and I have to admit the name sounded only faintly familiar to me. But, as it happens, I had apparently written a post previously on Myers inability to understand Hart and the philosophical issues at stake in the God debate:

This much, at least, can be reasonably inferred from his recent post on Pharyngula, a response to David Hart's new essay in First Things. Despite Myers' claim that he attacks all arguments for the existence of God, he frankly admits that he does not comprehend the terms employed in the cosmological proof for God's existence: "composite", "contingent", "finite", "temporal", "absolute plenitude of being", and so on. 

These terms are, of course, slightly technical; but they are the basic vocabulary used in metaphysics in general, and the cosmological argument in particular. Hart is prone to unusual verbiage, but this is simply not the case here. Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the cosmological argument from the original texts knows these basic terms. 

"Composite" just means a thing composed of matter and form; two elementary concepts from Aristotle's metaphysics. "Contingent" is simply a being that might exist or might not, but doesn't exist necessarily. "Finite" simply signifies that a thing is circumscribed within limits. "Temporal" signifies that a thing is subject to change over time. "Absolute plenitude of being" is simply a reference to God as pure actuality in Book VIII of Aristotle's Physics. This is Philosophy 101 level material. 

P. Z. Myers' bafflement indicates that he has not made the slightest effort to familiarize himself with the cosmological arguments as it appears in the primary texts or, for that matter, anywhere. Even Richard Dawkins would have made the effort to scurry on over to infidels.org, so that he could at least find the (incorrect) stock response. Myers didn't even bother to do a quick Google search. 

I won't say the cosmological argument is easy; it certainly can be formulated in many ways, and implicates the deepest questions of ontology (as I've written about before here). In fact, my only complaint about Hart's piece is that he doesn't make the cosmological argument, he just describes it in an oversimplified way. It's a bit as though P. Z. Myers explains to someone that evolution is a biological process whereby fitter animals survive, speciation occurs, and the animal kingdom gets more complex over time, on which his interlocutor would express dismay that anyone could possibly understand the concepts "fitness", "speciation", or biological complexity. Myers would no doubt end the conversation there, and instruct his interlocutor to at least get the basic ideas down so that the subject may be intelligently discussed. 

The same thing is going on in Myers post. He doesn't understand the most basic of the philosophic issues involved, and he cannot expect competent philosophers or theologians to take him seriously. Why should they? They can't read the Physics for him; he must do that for himself. 

What would Myers think of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason? Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit? Heidegger's Being and Time? If he can't get the concept of actuality straight, I can only imagine what he would think of transcendental idealism or an immanentalist ontology. Or what he would think of David Hart's academic philosophical writings (which are actually difficult). 

In the end, Myers just proves Hart's point. Unlike the great atheists of yesterday, the neo-atheists don't have the faintest clue about the very arguments they claim to reject. Myers has the courtesy not to pretend that he does. For his honesty, I suppose, we should be grateful.

In which New Atheist P.Z. Myers criticizes me for an article I didn't even write

And it just goes downhill from there.

Well, after having just gotten finished correcting New Atheist P.Z. Myers for his last set of mistakes in responding to one of my posts, here we are again to do the same thing. I wouldn't mind correcting Myers so often if I didn't not have to correct the very same mistakes over and over.

And over.

Can't the atheists come up with someone who can at least get his facts straight? Do they have no quality control at all? Where is the Bureau for Better Atheists?

Today Myers once again repeats the same mistake he's made, what? At least twice already? He's got it in his teeny little scientific brain that I am a creationist. An "Intelligent Design creationism." And he is undaunted in his belief that I am an "Intelligent Design creationist" by the fact that I am neither a) a creationist nor b) an advocate of Intelligent Design.

I have never advocated either of these things.

In fact, we had a back and forth a couple of years ago about the fact that I take no position on how life developed. He was upset because I had said that I don't take a position on scientific issues because I have no expertise in science. It would be like a New Atheists taking a position on philosophical issues despite having no philosophical expertise, which they do all the time and look pretty silly doing.

What particularly upset him was my unwillingness to accept on mere authority everything said by people in white coats just because they said it.

So now he accuses me for taking a position on an issue he previously criticized me for not taking a position on. If you're going to be a "New" Atheist, you ought to at least be an improvement over the old ones. Unfortunately, we have here proof that they just don't make atheists the way they used to.

Myers, who is unwilling to accept on mere authority anything said by people in cassocks just because they said it (and criticizes anyone who does) thought it the height of wisdom to take positions on issues about which you are singularly uninformed and in which you aren't terribly interested.

Not only did Myers get his facts wrong about what I believe about such things, he criticized me for what I said in an article I didn't even write. The article he criticized was written, not by me, but by my son Thomas, a fact Myers would have known had he, I don't know, read the byline.

If survival of the fittest operates in the world of atheists, I'm afraid we may not have Myers around much longer.

But now that we're on the subject, I did find it amusing that in his attack on what I didn't say about Jerry Coyne in the article I did not write about him, Myers defends Coyne for criticizing a book he did not read. You gotta admire these New Atheists: When it come to low intellectual standards they stick together.

In fact, I take back what I just said about P.Z. Myers not being fit to survive. I may have just discovered the atheist mechanism for surviving despite their inability to carefully read and understand their opponents positions: They form a tight defensive ring when threatened by the truth.

Myers proceeds to criticize the arguments I didn't make in the article I didn't write by creating some imaginary fictional dialogue between him and me that goes on and on about various other arguments that have little or nothing to do with Thomas' article.

In addition to being incoherent, it isn't even very imaginative. If I were him, I wouldn't quite my day job for this reason. He should quit his day job (being a not very convincing atheist) for entirely different reasons.

I just noticed that Myers blogs at Freethoughtsblog. I guess you get what you pay for.

NEWS: Bureau for Better Atheists Sanctions P.Z. Myers

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 22, 2014

The Bureau for Better Atheists (BBA) today sanctioned Internet atheist P.Z. Myers for doing exactly what he was criticizing the BBA's Martin Cothran for in a post on the belief that there is life on other planets. "This is just the kind of atheist we have to deal with on an almost daily basis," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for the group. "Our goal is to improve the low quality of atheists so that we can have an intelligent argument with them. Myers, needless to say, has remained impervious to improvement."

The BBA has had to put Myers on probation before for what it called "sheer boneheadedness," but today's formal censure came after Myers got several things completely wrong in his attack on this post today in which he charges Cothran with getting several things completely wrong.

Cothran's post had simply applied the most common criterion used by atheist scientists to demarcate science from non-science, and pointed out that, under this criterion, the belief that there is life elsewhere in the universe is no more falsifiable than belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a satirical fiction developed by atheists scientists to discredit belief in God.

Cothran pointed out that Myers' post was titled: "It takes a creationist to pack so much wrong in so little space" despite the fact that Cothran is not a creationist. Then, in his opening paragraph Myers says:

Apparently, Martin Cothran believes that there is no life elsewhere in the universe, and that this unimaginably vast emptiness is evidence that a god created us. I don’t understand the logic, but then I don’t understand most of his weird leaps in this post on how life on other planets is like believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

But that was not Cothran's argument. "Nowhere in the post did I say that there was no life on other planets, which is why, in our censure, we recommended that Myers find an English interpreter." Cothran's argument was not that the belief that there was life on other planets was wrong, only that it it didn't meet the falsifiability criterion and that, if that was the case, then under that criterion it had no more claim to be science than believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

"Myers not only got my position on creationism wrong--as well as my position on life on other planets--he also somehow got the idea that I was in favor of Popper's falsifiability criterion when, in fact, the whole reason for making my remarks was that I don't believe the falsifiability critierion is a proper method of demarcation." Cothran said that Myers "disagrees with all the things I didn't say, and, agrees with the things I did say but hasn't figured out I said."

He said the fact that Myers actually agrees with him on this issue has caused him to go back and reassess it just to make sure he right, but only after, he said, "I've had a strong drink."

###

Atheist rally will NOT include guillotines, says P. Z. Myers

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FEBRUARY 20, 2012

An advocacy group that is pushing for atheists to be more civil said today that it applauded the announcement this weekend by atheist scientist P. Z. Myers that the "Rally for Reason," to be held in Washington, DC on March 24, will not include guillotines. Martin Cothran, spokesman for the group "Citizens for A More Rational Atheism" (CAMRA) said this was a huge concession on the part of Myers and others involved in the Rally.

Cothran said his group had no reason to disbelieve Myers, but said that CAMRA would be watching developments leading up to the rally. "This is an encouraging development," he said. "We think it could lead to the development of atheism with a human face."

Cothran said his group had recently expressed concerns over the nature of the Rally for Reason this March. "Other than all of the Soviet military parades that took place during the 20th century, the last large build-up of atheists was the French Revolution, and it wasn't pretty." Cothran pointed to the "Festival of Reason," an atheist event held at Notre Dame in November of 1793 which apparently descended into the lascivious and depraved, as a cause for concern.

"It was events like this that became so embarrassing the Robespierre finally put a stop to it. You know you're in pretty bad shape when you become too depraved even for Robespierre," he said. "And if atheists embarrass themselves again, there will no Robespierre around this time to stop it."

He said he hoped that in addition to swearing off the use of guillotines on the Mall, rally speakers would elevate the level of invective from that which they have employed in recent years. "We have been quite disappointed in the quality of atheist rhetoric," he said. "Much of the vituperation leveled by atheists such as Myers is not appreciably more sophisticated than elementary school bathroom insults."

"Our group is willing to help try to come up with a linguistic symbol system for atheists like Myers," said Cothran, "to allow them to express snarls, growls, and bellows in various intonations so that they can better express the exact meaning of their thoughts. This might help us better communicate with them and try to improve their level of communication. We know the primitive insults hurled by Myers play well with the people in the comboxes of websites like Myers' Pharyngula, many of whose verbal remarks are logically indistinguishable from grunting, but there are a few of us who would really like to improve the level of debate above the neanderthal level."

Cothran, an author of several logic textbooks widely used around the country, said his group was even considering setting up an exhibit booth at the rally to assist atheists to negotiate the reasoning process in order to lessen their temptation to hurl mindless epithets. "We could give some simple initial instruction in the construction of arguments and the deductive reasoning process. We're not hopeful it would be terribly welcome, but we really do want to help these people."

###

Is P. Z. Myers a sorry excuse for an atheist?

In his "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," C. S. Lewis' senior devil Screwtape addresses a banquet of tempters in training and apologizes for the poor quality of the souls on which they are having to dine. "[I]t would be vain to deny," says Screwtape, "that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality. Not all the most skillful cookery of our tormentors could make them better than insipid."

Screwtape compares the souls of contemporary sinners unfavorably to those of bygone days:

Oh, to get one's teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII or even a Hitler! There was real crackling there, something to crunch; a rage, an egotism, a cruelty only just less robust than our own. It put up a delicious resistance to being devoured. It warmed your inwards when you'd got it down.

Scott Stephens makes a similar point--a point made earlier this year by David Bentley Hart--about the intellectual quality of modern atheists.

I have said many times before that the New Atheists are a pale imitation of the old atheists of late 19th and early 20th centuries who were not simply cultural barbarians, but men widely learned beyond science, most of whom actually understood much of what they criticized. The Thomas Huxleys and H. L. Menckens have, alas, been replaced by the likes of Myers and Richard Dawkins.

Huxley, of course, claimed to be an agnostic, an intellectual character George Barnard Shaw once called an atheist without the courage his convictions. But Huxley was just as much an enemy of the Church.

Where are the atheists now who can come with lines like Huxley's, "extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science like snakes around the cradle of Hercules"? Or Mencken's "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing"?

They were wrong, of course, but they were magnificently, gloriously wrong--unlike Myers and his ilk, who, when they go wrong (which is not infrequent), do it with an unfortunate lack of rhetorical sophistication. If you're going to be wrong, you should at least provide your audience with something to marvel at. To read Mencken's Treatise on the Gods is, if not to be philosophically impressed, at least to be wondered at for its creativity (he basically makes up the history of religious belief as he goes along).

When the old atheists missed, you could at least admire the impressive explosion, but when the New Atheists miss (which they do at least as often), you find yourself standing there disappointed, gazing on a logical dud.

When the old atheists fired a barb, you often found yourself tipping your hat. With the New Atheists, you just find yourself shaking your head. To read Myers is to have to wade knee high through sophomoric vitriol that someone like Mencken would scorned as juvenile, if not simply insipid.

They also had stouter constitutions, these paleo-atheists. Today's atheists--like the ones now suing the state of Kentucky over God language in its Homeland Security statute--have even taken to claiming to be emotionally traumatized by mentions of God. The expression "put on your man pants" suffered severe overuse in the last election, but if it has a legitimate use, it would be here.

No self-respecting atheist of yore would claim he experienced "mental pain and anguish" because of theism. He would instead have tried to inflict it on his theistic opponents.

Hand it to Myers, he at least tries to do this, if he doesn't exactly succeed.

In a new post at his blog, Myers complains about these unfavorable comparisons of him and his fellow New Atheists to the Great Atheists of Old:

This is such a dreary and dishonest approach; it involves puffing up dead or less popular atheists into demigods who strode the earth with cosmic seriousness, while anyone new and slightly less moribund is sneered at as inferior, the weak and enfeebled scions of a diminished age, and therefore deserving nothing but dismissal.

Well, at least he produced a mildly competent alliteration in that first sentence. And I do like the "strode the earth" bit. Oh, and the "scions of a diminished age" isn't too bad either.

Maybe there's hope.

But it's all downhill from there. Myers retorts that he and his New Atheist friends place greater stress on science--something he apparently thinks the old atheists knew nothing about:

I disagree — these New Atheists are simply basing their ideas more strongly on science, something the theistic critics don't seem to comprehend — and I don't consider them less than the Old Atheists, just different, and even there, we're all making the same argument that gods don't exist.

The point Myers seems to miss is that at least the Old Atheists knew enough about science to know the difference between science and philosophy, a distinction people like Myers, Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking run roughshod over without apparent notice. In fact, Myers seems to have a generally troubled relationship with philosophy, the one discipline competence in which is required to conduct the kind of discussion in which he thinks he is competent to engage.

So Myers, seemingly unequipped with a philosophy gland, beats his chest and let's loose the atheist yell which he hopes will resound throughout the religious forest, attracting an opponent:

And if the New Atheists are such scrawny, flabby specimens, why aren't you simply clobbering us with those powerful arguments you developed to crush our predecessors?

Um, maybe because he wouldn't recognize a powerful argument if it had a sign saying "Powerful Argument Here" on it? There are a multitude of arguments offered by thinkers far more substantive than Myers that have been presented over the last 2,000, and the fact that Myers isn't impressed with them tells us very little about the quality of the arguments themselves. They tell us more about Myers.

Myers has confronted the theistic enemy before, only to come away scratching his head. He complains that Stephens doesn't offer any real arguments and then compares him in this regard to Terry Eagleton and David Bentley Hart.

It's interesting that he should mention Hart, who is one of the theists Myers has ham-handedly tried to confront, only to walk away thinking he has encountered the enemy successfully when in reality he has only encountered his own philosophical inadequacies.

The technique Myers and others (I'm thinking especially of Ed Brayton here) use is this: they troll the Internet for stupid things Christians say, present them to their readers as representative of theistic thought, shoot them down, and then high five each other as if they had really accomplished something. Call it the Shooting Fish in a Barrel Method of atheistic apologetics.

It's sort of like going down to the local pay lake, catching a big fish and thinking that you're God's gift to sportsmanship.

If he were really interested in competent theistic opposition he could go over to Frank Beckwith's blog--or Ed Feser's. But no. That would require some actual intellectual exertion. Or maybe it's because every time he does do this, he simply embarrasses himself.

As soon as Myers encounters a competent thinker like Hart, he seems to experience some sort of intellectual breakdown that causes him to rhetorically wander around mumbling imprecations against his target that indicate he knows nothing about what the person is talking about or simply become oblivious to what the person is saying, not understanding the person' simplest statements.

Myers recent responses to two of Myers posts on Hart have been dealt with in detail by my co-blogger Thomas here and here. But suffice it to say they are not exactly inspiring intellectual displays.

Nope. Stephens is right. They just don't make atheists like they used to.

P. Z. Myers needing a designated logician on the Gaskell case

Oh my, it looks like we have really upset Internet atheist P. Z. Myers once again. At least that is what I conclude from all the snarling in his response to my opinion piece today in the Lexington Herald-Leader on the University of Kentucky's Gaskell Affair over at his blog "Pharyngula."

But maybe it's not a sign of his being upset. He does, after all do this all the time. Maybe its just a part of his genetic make-up to act this way. Or possibly it was something in his upbringing. I have heard of young children taken when they were young and raised by wolves. Although, in Myers' case, I'm not sure even the wolves would have taken him.

Myers' post seems to have been penned on the principle that a sufficient number of epithets and pejorative adjectives at some point constitute an argument.

No, wait. I'm sorry. I may have spoken too soon. After removing several layers of vitriol, and dusting away a large quantity of vindictiveness, I think I may have discovered some actual attempts to make a logical case against my arguments. Okay, so they're not exactly impressive, but let's see what we can make of them.

Here is Myer's main argument, such as it is:

He claims that the reason Gaskell was not hired was religious oppression, overt discrimination against him for the fact of being a Christian. A university in America would have virtually no faculty or staff if they had an unspoken policy of discrimination against the Christian majority in this country; there were believers on that committee, I'm sure, just as there are believers on every committee I've ever worked with at my universities, and the atheists are usually the minority. So to claim that this committee thought that the idea of a candidate going to church was grounds for exclusion is absurd.

Does Myers really believe that you have to have a policy of discrimination "against the Christian majority in this country" to run afoul of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Does he think the only way someone can sue for racial discrimination is because a university has a "policy," spoken or unspoken, against a whole racial minority?

Who's being absurd?

You violate the Civil Rights Act when you discriminate against one person. If you're black and a university discriminates against you, you don't have to prove there's a general conspiracy against blacks. All you have to prove is that they discriminated against you because you're black.

Let's just be glad Myers isn't an attorney. And for crying out loud keep him away from racial discrimination issues. No telling how many African Americans have been filing false discrimination cases.

The case showing UK discriminated against Gaskell because he was an evangelical Christian was a dream case for an attorney. The e-mail documents in the case referring to him as "potentially evangelical" by one committee member and other e-mails from other members of the committee with first hand experience of what went on alleging that he was, in fact, being discriminated against are about as hot as smoking guns get. It just don't get any better than this--or worse, depending on your perspective.

Gaskell's employment was questioned, not because he is a Christian, but because he is an evangelical Christian who used his authority as an astronomer to mislead the public about biology.

Where? What precisely did Gaskell say about biology in any professional capacity that was professionally out of bounds?

In fact, the whole rest of his post goes on under the assumption that Gaskell held some view in his professional capacity that violates basic tenets of biology. But he never says what this is.

He wasn't turned away because he was a Christian, but because he actively uses Christianity as an excuse to peddle falsehoods and doubts. And the objection wasn't to the "Christian" part, but to the "false doubts" part.

Myers' appears to be completely ignorant of this case. The e-mail from Sally Shafer that must have had the UK administration scared enough about the eventual outcome of this case to want to settle didn't say that Gaskell was a "potential peddler of falsehoods and doubts." It said he was a "potential evangelical."

That makes Sally Shafter a potential bigot. And it makes Myers' a potential ostrich, sticking his head in the sand and ignoring the actual evidence in this case. If this case doesn't constitute religious discrimination, then nothing does.

He should have just stuck with the epithets. They would have been more logically compelling.

Historical Doubts Concerning P. Z. Myers

Atheist P. Z. Myers has recently articulated the position that there is no way he could ever even conceivably be convinced that God exists. His position is disputed by another atheistic biologist, Jerry Coyne. Myers position is that there is, by definition, no evidence that does or could count for God's existence; Coyne's position is that there is evidence that could count for God's existence, but that, in fact, there isn't any.

Here is Myers summarizing his case:

The nature of this god is always vague and undefined and most annoyingly, plastic — suggest a test and it is always redefined safely away from the risk. Furthermore, any evidence of a deity will be natural, repeatable, measurable, and even observable…properties which god is exempted from by the believers' own definitions, so there can be no evidence for it. And any being who did suddenly manifest in some way — a 900 foot tall Jesus, for instance — would not fit any existing theology, so such a creature would not fit the claims of any religion, but the existence of any phenomenon that science cannot explain would not discomfit science at all, since we know there is much we don't understand already, and adding one more mystery to the multitude will not faze us in the slightest.
So yes, I agree. There is no valid god hypothesis, so there can be no god evidence, so let's stop pretending the believers have a shot at persuading us.

Okay, so his first point is that religious beliefs are stated in such a way as to be non-falsifiable. I dealt yesterday with the similar position of Jerry Coyne, who claims that even the Resurrection is not falsifiable for the strange reason that believers (he asserts) do not defend this claim with reason or evidence. My response was that a) it wouldn't matter to the claim's actual falsifiability how its defenders defended it; and b) that his assertion is false, since there are plenty of defenses of the Resurrection based on reason and evidence. The Resurrection is a falsifiable claim, and waving one's hand and casually dismissing it does not count as a legitimate refutation.

Secondly, Myers says that any evidence for God would have to be "natural, repeatable, measurable, and even observable." The problem with setting the bar so high should be evident. Indeed, under these criteria, something like the Resurrection could not count as evidence for God. The problem is that the Resurrection would not be the only thing that could not be proven under these criteria.

In fact, along with the Resurrection, one would have to reject every other historical fact, even the ones everyone accepts. The assassination of Julius Ceasar is natural, but it is not repeatable, measurable, or even, given that it happened in the past, observable. The Norman Conquest of England is likewise not repeatable, measurable, nor observable. Nor is the existence of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The case of Napoleon has particular historical interest in this regard. When David Hume articulated his influential argument against miracles in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Bishop Richard Whately responded in a book entitled Doubts Concerning the Existence of Napoleon Bonaparte by taking all of the criteria Hume said a miracle would have to meet and applied them to the existence of Napoleon and concluded, tongue firmly planted in cheek, that Napoleon did not exist. Problem was, Napoleon was actually living on the island of Elba, in exile, when Whately wrote the book.

One could perform an equally damning reductio ad absurdum on Myer's criteria. In fact, if we took Myer's criteria and applied them to what he had for breakfast this morning, we would have to say the event never happened. In fact, under Myer's criteria, no event ever happened. The only events that can be accepted are events that are happening, since they are the only ones that are actually observable. Anything that happened in the past must be rejected under this view.

Finally, Myers responds to Coyne by admitting that Coyne's imaginary case of a 900 foot tall Jesus appearing now for all to see would fit the criteria but that no religion actually makes such a claim. He's right, of course. He could have added that it would be hard to say what such an event would actually prove. It doesn't address the central problem of human existence: death. Nor does it prove that there is life after death as does the claim that Christianity does, in fact, make.

And, actually, even that event wouldn't meet Myer's criteria, since it wouldn't be repeatable, and after it had happened and wasn't happening any more it wouldn't be observable either.

If Myers actually had any philosophical sophistication in him, he would make an argument more similar to Gottlieb Lessing, who argued that the contingent truths of history cannot imply anything about the necessary truths of religion. Known as "Lessing's ditch," the argument, fallacious as it was, at least had prima facie plausibility. Myer's ditch on the other hand, is embarrassingly shallow in comparison.

Someone get the man a good shovel.