Jerry Coyne's Scientistic Dismissiveness Of Philosophy

October 28, 2011 By 56 Comments

UPDATE: Dr. Coyne has been kind enough to take the time to reply to my remarks (and those of Verbose Stoic) below. My reply to his riposte is the inaugural post in a new series (which I hope does not need too many installments!): Defending Philosophy 1: A Reply To Dr. Coyne. Verbose Stoic replies here. Thursday, Jerry Coyne mocked Templeton for funding a post-doc studying issues related [...]

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Defending The Apparent Truth Of Evolution’s Mindlessness

February 21, 2011 By 4 Comments

Last Christmas Eve, I argued that the belief that God “guided evolution” was not a rationally respectable way to reconcile science with faith but rather it was essentially an effective denial of the theory of natural selection, in its scientifically explanatory sense. Part of the revolutionary character of the discovery of evolution by natural selection [...]

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On Defending True Spirituality And Taking The Word Back From Spiritually Bankrupt Fundamentalism

January 6, 2011 By 5 Comments

So Chris Mooney’s article in Playboy about the spirituality of scientists has sparked some interesting debate in the atheist blogosphere. His new post on the subject explicitly interprets his aims and themes in the piece as essentially saying what I interpreted them to be—to defend the idea that you can have completely sufficient spirituality without [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Ethics, Ethics, Featured, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, Morality, Morality, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Rationalism, Religion, Religion, Religion and Science, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Religious Secularism, Religious Secularism, Secularism, Spinoza, Spinoza Tagged With: , , 5 Comments

The Hard Evidence Against A Literal Adam And Eve

June 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Jerry Coyne explains why the proposed idea of a single pair of original human ancestors is refuted by what we know of our evolutionary ancestry: Over at the Templeton-funded BioLogos website there has been a lot of discussion about the historicity of Adam and Eve. This is a problem because scripture claims these two were [...]

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Deepity

October 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Last week I highlighted both a portion of Jerry Coyne’s report from AAI and independently Andrew Sullivan’s nasty retort to another portion of that same post.  But I never quoted the really fun and on target coinage of Daniel Dennett which got so far under Sullivan’s skin: Dan Dennett talked about interviews with active priests [...]

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“Where Was His Miracle?”

October 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A poignant two paragraphs from Jerry Coyne’s piece reporting from the AAI that I mentioned Andrew Sullivan maligned earlier: It’s the first time I’ve been in a group of fellow atheists (and I haven’t detected one sign of stridency or militancy), and it gives one a warm supportive feeling. One of the functions of speaking [...]

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More Thoughts On Scientists In The Public Square

August 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment

My previous post today on religious scientists was based on a comment I first made on the blog He Lives in reply to a post there.  Below is a subsequent comment from that blog from “Wandering Internet Commenter” interspersed with my replies to him. Normative arguments are fun and all, but it never hurt to [...]

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What’s Wrong With Religious Scientists?

August 17, 2009 By 3 Comments

As we have already noted previously, Jerry Coyne has attacked the notion that scientific illiteracy can be blamed on the recent rise of the New Atheists as though they have scared religious people away from science in their mere 5 years as an identifiable movement. Recently in reply to this debate between “New Atheists” like [...]

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Religion As A Morally and Politically Ambivalent Force

August 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Two weeks ago, I profiled various remarks from Jerry Coyne for the incisive way they challenged assumptions that (1) religion is indispensable for moral progress, (2) that religion is even on balance usually an aid to moral progress, and (3) that moral progress is even something observable over the course of history.  Coyne’s remarks were written [...]

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Is American Scientific Illiteracy The New Atheists’ Fault?

August 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Jerry Coyne pushes back hard (again) against the latest publication of the falsehood that American resistance to evolution is the New Atheists’ fault: 1.  The “new atheists” have been on the scene for exactly five years, beginning with Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, published in 2004.  But American’s attitudes to evolution have been relatively [...]

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