Friday, May 22, 2009

Disingenuous ...

... Why is Charlotte Allen so mad at atheists? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I notice that Myers does not address this part of Allen's piece:
Then there's P.Z. Myers, biology professor at the University of Minnesota's Morris campus, whose blog, Pharyngula, is supposedly about Myers' field, evolutionary biology, but is actually about his fanatical propensity to label religious believers as "idiots," "morons," "loony" or "imbecilic" in nearly every post. The university deactivated its link to Myers' blog in July after he posted a photo of a consecrated host from a Mass that he had pierced with a rusty nail and thrown into the garbage ("I hope Jesus' tetanus shots are up to date") in an effort to prove that Catholicism is bunk -- or something.

But he does say this:
Contrary to Allen's claim that we aren't interested in criticizing the important elements of religious belief, we are: We go right to the central issue of whether there is a god or not. We're pretty certain that if there were an all-powerful being pulling the strings and shaping history for the benefit of human beings, the universe would look rather different than it does. It wouldn't be a place almost entirely inimical to our existence, with a history that reveals our existence was a fortunate result of a long chain of accidents tuned by natural selection.
I, however, as a person of faith, do not thing of God as "pulling the strings." That's a parodistic notion of God. And given how finely tuned the world is to make itself accommodating to us it is hard to regard it as "a place almost entirely inimical to our existence." But then Myers is a biologist, not a philosopher.

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