Catholic Replies to Fundamentalist…

…who happens to be an atheist. Jerry Coyne is apparently a P.Z. Myers understudy who likes to imagine that volume supplies for deficiencies in content. In addition to barking meaningless things like “Science wins over religion because science works!” (Works at what? What is “religion”? It usually means “Christianity” when used by an Evangelical Atheist but it covers an awful lot of ground and some definitions are in order. What “work” is science doing that “religion” does not do? Is that the only sort of “work” in the universe? If I need somebody to answer “Why is there anything?” or “What do I tell my suicidal friend who feels life is meaningless?” does Coyne’s vision of science “work” here? Does “working” constitute the sole raison d’etre for a thing? Does the Mona Lisa or Bach’s St. Matthew Passion “work”? If not, should we burn them?)

In addition, Coyne seems to want to have his cake and eat it. When science adjusts its paradigm to include new data, we are to celebrate the glorious achievement of science’s ability to cope with new information. When theology does exactly the same thing (because it is, you know, a science) Coyne declares theologians to be ad hoc liars who are making it up as they go along. What is virtue in one science is denigrated as a lie in another science. The common denominator in all this is the Coyne who flips out and declares, “Heads I win. Tails you lose.”