Jonny Scaramanga wrote a good post explaining why creationism matters.
We should be worrying about creationism. But everyone is worried about it for the wrong reasons. Yes, creationism is false, and young-Earth creationism is particularly ridiculous. But with thousands of false beliefs in circulation, why should we particularly care about creationism? It doesn’t make much difference to my daily life whether or not I accept that all life on Earth shares a single common ancestor, or that the planet is 4.54 billion years old. Even in science, there are limited areas where the fact of common descent is immediately relevant.
The trouble is that the areas of fundamentalism which are truly oppressive— the denial of women’s rights and bigotry against LGBTQ people, for example—are intimately bound up with creationism. You’ll notice that, amid its busy schedule of producing pseudoscience, Answers in Genesis has found time to oppose gay marriage. There aren’t a lot of copies of The Selfish Gene in Quiverfull homes, either. These facts are not coincidences.
I agree. It takes a special something to regard a book as literally infallible, and once you’ve adopted that position, it leads to a remarkable acceptance of antique ideas that contradict the modern experience. Answers in Genesis, for instance, gets a lot of press for pushing creationism, but to the fundamentalist community, they do a heck of a lot more: they affirm the centrality of “Bible-believing” dogma to a whole flock of issues. They fuel the kind of apocalyptic despair that the Bible is so good at promoting: denying the literal truth of the book of Genesis is just the thin edge of the wedge, because next they’ll question Jesus, and then the doctrine of Original Sin, and then the whole idea of salvation, and next thing you know, your children are having gay sex before burning in Hell.
Strangely, Jerry Coyne disagrees.
His problem is that Scaramanga doesn’t blame religion enough.
I think the problem with this logic is obvious. Yes, of course the same people who accept creationism by and large favor a secondary role for women and promote discrimination against gays. But that doesn’t make creationism any worse than it already is; all that means is that it’s a symptom of a larger syndrome.
That syndrome is called religion, and its instantiation in this case is fundamentalist Christianity and much of Orthodox Judaism. But just because creationism is linked to these other symptoms doesn’t make it matter more. It’s like saying that because nerve damage, frequent thirst, and slow healing of cuts are all symptoms of diabetes, the frequent thirst matters more than it did when we were unaware of the other symptoms.
What matters is the underlying cause of all three conditions, and that is religion. The Biblical connection between these three forms of bigotry and ignorance means that we should fight harder against religion, not fight harder against creationism. If we prohibit the teaching of creationism in schools, will that efface the homophobia and misogyny of its adherents? I don’t think so. Now Scaramanga would be right if by concentrating on creationism, rather than on religion in general or on homophobia and misogyny, we could get rid of religion faster. But I’m not sure that’s the case. You cure the disease by attacking the disease, not by treating one of its symptoms.
I oppose religion, too. But how do you treat it? Religion is a complex smear of compulsions and rituals and traditions, and it’s all tied up in identity. It’s a category error to treat it as one “cause”, and all of us treat the symptoms. Coyne promotes science and fights creationism, and those are just as much combating symptoms as critiquing Quiverful philosophy or going after bad educational policies or or ridiculing politico-religious arguments. Religion is a personal phenomenon, and we’re all batting at eruptions of nonsense in the hope that it will awaken people to the problem.
I have no idea how we’re supposed to attack the cause in this case other than by chomping at the weaknesses, bit by bit. It’s not as if there is some central citadel called RELIGION that we can assault, and after it falls, everyone just stops believing.
Scaramanga has an excellent rebuttal. If you’re going to pin problems like creationism, sexism, and homophobia on a root cause, you better be sure you pick the right one.
The underlying cause of creationism, homophobia, and misogyny, says Jerry, is religion, and it is religion we must oppose. And here, I suspect, it is Jerry whose logic is flawed. Clearly, not all religion is all of these things, althoumuch (perhaps most) of it is. Some religious people are among the most vocal opponents of creationism, and for some their faith is an extra reason to oppose the subjugation of women and gay people. Some of those people are among this blog’s most vocal supporters. So we’re going to need a different reason to oppose all religion, because this one is not fit for purpose.
Biblical literalism, on the other hand, is a root cause of all three of the problems at hand. The problem is the way creationists read the Bible. It promotes not just creationism, patriarchy, and gay-bashing, but also the denial of history, the enthusiastic acceptance of immorality, and an irrational rejection of opposing evidence. It is an intellectual black hole. But not all religion is Biblical literalism.
There is a syndrome of denial — the rejection of sexual and racial equality, for instance — but mere religion isn’t part of it. There are atheists who are as rancidly awful as anything out of the Phelps clan, and religious people who are selfless, egalitarian, and open-minded. Coyne is just flat out wrong.
But I can also understand one aspect in which he is right. If your central concern is truth, then all religion is equally terrible, because they all promote faith and the acceptance of nonsense. If the disease is lies, then yes, religion is a cause, and you should attack it on those grounds.
But that’s not the only disease we have to deal with. If religion is the Father of Lies, then dogma and tribalism and authoritarianism are the Mother of Injustice. These aren’t the same thing. You can use the truth to promote evil, and lies to promote good. Obviously we’d like to support both, and use truth to create good consequences for people, but you’ve also got to prioritize…and sometimes you have to focus on Justice, not just Truth. Knowing that the Earth is 4½ billion years old is cold comfort when you’re starving, or being beaten to death because your sexuality fails to conform to the mean, or being shot or imprisoned because authorities think your skin color means you deserve it. Maybe we should be wagging our fingers at Quakers and liberal Catholics and Episcopalians for believing in very silly things, but there are also times when we should be far, far more concerned about conservative literalists in high office who think Noah’s myth means we don’t have to worry about climate change, that Leviticus and the Ten Commandments are the laws of the land, and that the book of Revelation should guide our foreign policy.
Coyne is arguing from the position that values truth most of all; Scaramanga is standing up for justice. Both are essential to a well-rounded atheism. Truth and justice. Reason and compassion.
But then Coyne concludes his blog post with an incoherent mess…which also lets slip what really bugged him about Scaramanga’s post.
Why do I care about this logical fallacy? Because I see the evolution/creation battle as separate from the other battles about “social justice” that currently sunder the atheist “community” (if there is one). While I think all atheists are opposed to creationism, and most of us see religion as harmful, there are huge schisms in the movement about matters of social justice—more often about “misogyny” (a word sometimes applied to feminists who don’t agree with other feminists) than about homophobia, which all of us despise. I don’t want to have my battles against creationism subsumed into the “atheist wars”.
So much wrong to unpack in one little paragraph.
Sure, you can see evolution/creation as one battle, and social justice (which is a whole bunch of battles) as another. But how does this hang with his claim that there is one central cause, religion, which ties everything together into a neat bundle? We all have our causes and our talents, and I can say, you go, Dr Coyne. Be all the Jerry Coyne you can be. But that doesn’t mean you get to tell everyone else how they should combat religion. Your (and my) battle against creationism is a relatively narrow front, and one that actually doesn’t matter to a lot of people.
What he’s really doing here is suggesting that “social justice” and “misogyny” (in lovely scare quotes) are lesser concerns, or even distractions, because they cause these schisms. The implication is that there are legitimate concerns for atheism (Science!) and others that are less worthy (Feminism!) But I see the reverse. Because these cause Deep Rifts, it makes them more important to resolve.
I would throw his own words back at him. If religion is the central cause of all these ills we must oppose, how is it that atheists, who have if nothing else shed the poisonous burden of religion, can still promote sexism, racism, transphobia, etc.? Shouldn’t that tell you right there that theres more to it than religion? Unless, of course, you are vested in the attitude that we atheists can escape culpability by trivializing the problems. We just define away social problems propagated by atheists as non-serious!
And a fine job of trivializing he does. “Misogyny” can be waved away by putting it in quotes and claiming it’s a meaningless insult thrown by feminists at other feminists. Boko Haram apparently doesn’t exist; nor does the gunman who shot Malala Yousafzai; or the Republicans who campaign against reproductive rights for women; and Elliot Rodger was just crazy, don’t you know. We can all agree to despise homophobia (not all atheists do, actually), with the implication that endemic sexism is ignorable. Never mind that the Abrahamic religions that we’re supposed to fight are deeply patriarchal and misogynistic at their heart.
In fact, oppression of women and of gays are matters of greater import than is the teaching of creationism, and if I could wave a magic wand I’d make the first two disappear before the third. But it’s important to recognize that the bigger battle for social justice, however you define it, is the battle against religion, not against its symptoms. Those symptoms can and should be fought individually, but just as we can’t say that homophobia becomes more important because it’s philosophically linked to creationism, so we can’t say that creationism is more important because it’s philosophically linked to homophobia. There’s that unrecognized third variable in the mix!
OK. Once again: how do we fight religion without fighting its symptoms? Why fight against religion if you think social justice is something you postpone dealing with until religion is magically vanished? Why is religion the central variable we have to change when, as Scaramanga pointed out, there are religious individuals and organizations working hard for causes we all agree are important, while some atheists are fighting against them?
I would think that if we’re going to make opposition to religion our central cause, we’d also have a good body of clearly spelled out principles we’re fighting for, and if social justice isn’t high on the list, I’d like to know why.
Why? Because while gayz are a-okay, bitchez ain’t shit? Amirite?
Listen, whatever tent Jerry Coyne and others who put social justice in scare quotes occupy, I don’t want to be in it. Actually, I don’t even want to be anywhere near it.
One really excellent way of cutting the legs out from under religion is precisely to go after the symptoms. Once a person realizes that the things their religion has taught them about how certain people are and how they are to be treated and what damage they do to the world are entirely wrong, there’s not a whole lot left propping up the edifice. Convince people little by little that things their religion taught them don’t hold up, and eventually they see their religion as useless at best and entirely wrong at worst.
Misogyny and homophobia are rooted in religion. That’s why MRAs, Redditors and 4Chan all love Jesus so much. >___<
Wow, that’s some double-speak. First Coyne refers to three “conditions”, likening them to diseases. Misogyny and homophobia and then a few short paragraphs later brushes them off in quotes, alongside “social justice” (which, for the umpteenth thousand time, is only a four-letter word in the minds of really creepy people), as red herrings to the greater evil of creationism. Yeah, you’re right, that’s a mess. By the age of 4 or so, my daughter knew the story of the Cretaceous comet and itta-bitty rat-like creatures surviving it and becoming us. One day when her mother’s brother heard her describing the principle to a little boy playing with dinosaurs, the uber-Christian uncle stomped into the living room and scolded her: “that’s only ONE possible explanation”. I said nothing. Had she said to the little boy that girls are just as smart as boys, and the uncle had challenged THAT, he would have been pissing blood for a week. Sorry Jerry, social justice is much more important than whether kids hear just-so-stories.
Coyne:
It is revealing that Coyne so often speaks well of the phenomenon of scientists criticizing each other, but when feminists criticize each other, he implies it’s indicative of a problem.
Why can’t we just be against religion, misogyny, homophobia, & Creationism, as & when the opportunities arrise? Why can’t we just be Humanists?
I lived from 1985 thru 2012 in England. Humanism is much bigger there than it is in Canada or the States. This is unfortunate, because Humanism is making real, tangible progress in the UK, (although Cameron seems recently to have kyboshed Humanist weddings in England & Wales). Scotland actually approved Humanist marriages, which now have major market share.
Over there, there are two major secular groups, the British Humanist Association (a charity), & the National Secular Society (not restricted in its campaigning by charitable status). I belonged to both. Over here, it’s much more fragmented, among a proportionately smaller base. Too bad we can’t get our acts together this side of the pond.
From Scaramanga’s blog:
This is false.
At least out of the US, for a lot of people creationism is about 1. explaining life in a way they understand and 2. put humans on a pedestal, make them special.
These are people who barely read the Bible but still have a distaste for science.
Has Coyne always sucked at logic so bad or does feminism really just work him up into such a blind and irrational fury?
What’s worrying about creationism is its politics: anyone organizing coordinated campaigns which aim to force teachers to lie to their students has the establishment of a tyranny as their long-term goal. The justifications invoked are secondary at most.
***
Because these are great ways to justify oppressive systems, and the number of people who want to be the alpha bully is much higher than everyone likes to believe.
***
I always feel weird when I am reminded that my country, which made secular civil marriages the only legal norm over two centuries ago, is an outlier, even within the western hemisphere.
Yes, creationism is just a symptom and we need to address the disease itself. The problem is, the disease isn’t religion. Religion is just another symptom.
The “disease,” such as it is, is that humans naturally tend to make bad decisions in particular ways – assuming that popular ideas are valid, treating our childhood experiences as the baseline for how the world should work and so forth – and although we can learn to compensate for these tendencies, very few people actually do.
Religion (creationist or otherwise), and sexism are both bad ideas that are prevalent in our society because they are good at getting into the heads of people susceptible to popular bad ideas. So if you haven’t been “vaccinated” by learning the basics of critical thinking and skepticism and stuff, then you’ll tend to pick up both of those ideas for the same reason— although it’s just as possible you’ll only pick up one and become a liberal Christian or you’ll only pick up the other and become a Slimepitter. Or maybe you’ll pick up only unrelated bad ideas and become a liberal atheist anti-vaxxer like Bill Maher. (Unless Bill Maher came out as a bigot? I haven’t exactly been paying attention to him.)
Fighting for atheism OR social justice is addressing the symptoms, not the disease. That’s not to say those are bad things— treating a life-threatening symptom first and ignoring the underlying disease until the patient is stable is how medicine works. And, of course, in this case, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Some people can teach critical thinking and how to spot bullshit while others address sexism, racism, creationism, and other symptoms— and if anything, the former’s work will be easier because of the latter’s efforts. Suddenly figuring out that one of your most fervently held beliefs is bullshit tends to shake up one’s worldview a bit, and if someone helps you figure out why you believed it in spite of its falsehood then you’ll be even better equipped to avoid bad ideas in the future.
Honestly the real common factor to all of the cited symptoms seems more like conservative ideology than religion specifically. Or the overlap of both for creationism specifically.
Exactly. (hi, llewelly!!!)
I think the real problem is that humans are naturally distrustful of each other. Scratch the veneer of cooperation and altruism that evolution has slightly preferred in us and you’re left with the same old xenophobic chimps. It takes effort to like other people, it really does. It’s a lot of work to think of the needs of other people and give up something of yourself for it.
@10 anteprepro
Yea, absolutely. I’m confused on why it focused so heavily on religion especially when it comes to misogyny. Religion is bad because it gives leeway to conservatism, anti-intellectualism, and Just-World Hypothesis.
When religion doesn’t do those things, it’s not much of an issue.
@llewelly #4:
I would venture to guess that the first “feminists” in Coyne’s failagraph refers to folks like Christina Hoff Sommers, who adopt the label “feminist” while espousing beliefs that are anything but. In which case he might just as well say “pseudoscience” is a word sometimes applied to scientists who don’t agree with other scientists. After all, the IDists and Ken Ham claim to be scientists who just come to a different conclusion on evolutionary matters, so they must actually be doing science, right? We can only judge people by credulously accepting the labels they self-apply, right?
The “equity feminism” of Christina Hoff Sommers and the Slymepit and the like is basically “creation science.” Just because it uses a word doesn’t mean it’s using the word accurately. But to guys like Coyne, science matters and is worth defending, while feminism is fluffy nonsense so who cares who’s right?
I don’t get it. for literally DECADES now, we have known that the big problem is not religion itself, but any dogmatic belief system linked to authoritarian personalities.
and yet… all I see is people forgetting what we already know, and it’s like it has to be rediscovered every year, or even every fucking month!
seriously, the problem is that we as a society need to come to grips with the fact that 30% lean heavily authoritarian. for the most part, you’re not going to change that.
what needs to be done FIRST, is that we need to recognize and accept those differences, and then funnel them into more productive behaviors.
group behavior has a lot of functionality; it’s why army recruiters tend to look for kids who lean authoritarian. they’re very good at taking orders and acting as a cohesive unit. also has been selected for in a lot of corporate america for similar reasons.
there is value in society for this kind of behavior beyond making war, but until we can work it out, things like YEC (think about the fact that a modern YEC is just that, MODERN; you can trace back the roots of current YEC thinking to less than 70 years ago) will just keep repeating themselves, as those who lean authoritarian constantly try to grasp for things that build group cohesiveness.
Jerry forgets ALL of what we have learned about human behavior over the last 100 years. It’s NOT about religion. religion is a convenient fiction FFS.
You don’t know how to “attack” it, simply because you have also, like so many, seem to have forgotten what CAUSES it.
for fuck’s sake man, this stuff is all over the literature, both sociology and psychology journals have published on it for decades.
you’ve even READ the popular accounts, like Altemeyer.
you wanna know how to “fix” this?
READ ALTEMEYER AGAIN.
and AGAIN.
and AGAIN.
till you fucking STOP forgetting the significance of it.
@13, Tom Foss
Ya, this is exactly what sprang to my mind when I read that. I also suspect your examples are correct.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Try to say that atheism should be antagonistic to conservative ideology (like, say, what’s on display at CPAC), though, and watch the asshole atheists melt down.
I will accept Coyne’s position that religion is the root of all these evils if he will accept that evopsych is a religion.
I agree with Ichthyic and Jake Harban above. How people think is usually learned very young from the society, family and conditions a child is brought up in. Religion is just the most firmly established authority used to justify what you believe and how you live and think. Researchers in cognitive sciences have found that people’s decisions are usually made subconsciously and then justifications found to give the decisions a veneer of rationality. Religion is the biggest ‘rationalization’ for beliefs we have. All people have beliefs that aren’t rational; being an atheist means you have to find another reason to rationalise your beliefs or change them and most people find change very difficult. To change how society treats women, people of alternative sexualities, races and religions we have to attack the idea that those peoples are less human and less important than the socially dominant group. The religions will eventually change as their teachings become too unpopular in society. They’ll be forced to or diminish into cult status.
The daily cat dialogs was pushing me away from Coyne’s blog for a while, but him settling firmly down in the Freeze Peach/ all-good-atheists-are-Vulcan camp is what made me stop reading for good.
I will give him this: He doesn’t seem to have gone frothing, fedora-spinning, rage balls like Phil Mason did.
What makes creationism especially important to combat is that it has a pedagogical agenda. The creationists aren’t just the regular opponents of reason. They’re people who want to get to unreason installed into the minds of children. Their agenda is theocratic in a sense that makes their project more dangerous than, say, mere opposition to gay marriage, or what have you. The creationists want their crazy dogmas forced upon the entire nation. They aren’t just asking for an end to gay marriage, they’re asking everyone in America to believe in and practice their religion.
This shouldn’t be lost on we secularists. We have to strategically decide where to spend our energies. Creationisms pedagogical agenda – getting religious dogma taught in schools – is totalitarian in nature. What they want, in the end, is to have American schools be like those in Pakistan, where schooling, with the exception of the famed Karachi Grammar School, is extremely authoritarian in nature basically everywhere, and freedom of thought and questioning of authority is maximally discouraged.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, the Pakistani theoretical physicist who is perhaps the greatest voice of reason, science, and secularism in the Muslim world, explains how problematic Pakistani schooling is here:
And such a melt down would be bad thing?
@Krishan Bhattacharya
Well, you have a good point, that this isn’t just people being wrong about something, that it’s also people wanting to rot the brains of their children and set up a theocracy etc.
However, you seem to miss the fact that the opposition to gay marriage is similarly totalitarian in nature. And it is similarly about more than just being wrong about one thing (marriage) it’s mixed with all sorts of bigotries against gay people.
or maybe I misread your point about gay marriage.
Krishan Bhattacharya #20:
That ‘mere opposition to gay marriage, or what have you’ leads to harassment, bullying, and death. The ‘what have you’ part has closed off access to abortion to the point where there is a black market in abortifacient drugs and may well bring back the unlicensed back-street abortion and the DIY coat-hanger abortion, with all their associated dangers.
This is not ‘mere.’
I sort of agree with Coyne, but instead of blaming it all on religion, I would blame faith. I’m casting the net even wider, faith takes in religion, but also a lot of what is wrong with reactionary atheists. I’m quite prepared to take faith to the cleaners, wash it till it disintegrates and dance on the remains. And along with faith, I’m not too happy with habit, specifically, the kind of laziness which makes people hold on to ideas purely because they’re familiar. I can see why people do it, but I don’t think it should be tolerated where there’s evidence that it causes harm.
I wouldn’t call faith and habit thought crimes exactly, but I could call them sins. And as in the traditional conception of sin, we’re all more or less susceptible to them, some more than others, which explains a lot really.
Which is why I’m grateful that I’m no longer a supporter of American Atheists, whose president stated in an interview with Danielle Muscato at CPAC, that one of AA’s goals in attending was to help conservative Republicans get more votes.
Ugh. The “evolution/creation battle” is a front in a larger war, and frankly, I’m sick to death of people who pointedly refuse to get that.
Creationism is a very easy test case. The Bible says one thing; the facts say another. Should we avoid teaching these facts, or using them to guide public policy, because they offend some Christians?
LGBTQ rights shouldn’t be any harder, unless you’re an asshat. The Bible is pretty clear; gay is not okay. But if you leave them be, they will go about their normal happy lives. Should we avoid giving legal protection to LGBTQ people, and to their relationships, because the existence of queer couples with stable marriages, happy children, etc, all achieved without even the pretense of “complementarity” between traditional gender roles, is in fact deeply offensive to some Christians?
Reproductive health care shouldn’t be harder either. The Bible is clear; you get pregnant if and when God wants you to, and if you suffer or die in the process you deserved it, because Eve and *mumble* reasons. But science has given us IVF, the Pill, safe abortions, treatment for ectopic pregnancies, C-sections, epidurals, and so on, and nobody seems to get hit by lightning bolts for using these things. Should we avoid making use of these advances because their existence, again, offends some Christians?
They would like to make the rest of us complicit in creating their own Biblical theme park – where the only public policy guidance you need involves “praying on it”, the fags and sluts and heathens lead the short miserable lives they deserve, and of course, everything was poofed into existence a few thousand years ago. If the creationism is the only part of that you’re worried about, you can fuck right off to CPAC where you belong.
I’d also argue that holding the line for inconvenient people (not just facts!) is how progress against religion gets made. Most people don’t care that much about the age of the earth. They care about their gay uncle, or their neighbor’s test tube baby, or what have you, none of whom appear to be causing the apocalypse despite their preacher’s rants. It’ll make them think, and we all know how that ends…
Talking about these things in terms of symptom/cause seems to imply one-way causation, which is a misleading way to describe the situation. People learn from their surroundings; people’s religion is mostly determined by the practice of religion by their family and peers growing up and the same goes for their bigotries. Separating beliefs and the resulting practices into cause and symptom is like assigning a cause/symptom relationship to combustion and heat.
Truth and Justice? What happened to The American Way?
Maybe that gets a post of its own.
Seriously, I think misogyny is ‘only’ a symptom of a much bigger problem, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deal with those symptoms.
Misogyny and homophobia are part of the human condition. Religion gives a weapon to some of the misogynists and homophobes. The atheist ones find other ways to express themselves.
It’s this premise that is deeply flawed. As others have noticed, religion is just another way of shoddy thinking. Creationism is mostly nonexistent in Europe yet homophobia, misogyny and racism, transphobia and antisemitism are alive and kicking.
This is a post I read yesterday (in German) Maybe Google translate makes it at least understandable. It’s the experiences of a young black man who moved from Leipzig to Manheim. Leipzig, in east of Germany has a HUGE percentage of atheist. The racism there made him permanently afraid and sick. Manheim in the west has a lower percentage of atheists, but also a lot less racism. People are sitting next to him on the bus even though there are still other seats! (That almost made me cry).
As Samwise Gamgee said: pretty is who pretty does. Until atheism doesn’t actually stand for something more than disbelief in god, it’s a label that is more or less meaningless to me.
Blergh, i’m so glad i stopped wasting my time with Coyne…
Then why don’t you try putting your actions were your mouth is…because you are doing the exact opposite. You are waving away the oppression of women in favour of the purity of atheism as a movement against religion. Except i always forget, of course, that it’s always “oppression of women” as defined by you, a male….so i’m sure in your head this is all perfectly consistent for your value of male, Vulcan approved oppression. Not the oppression described by women, oh no, that’s just emotional wailing about nothing of importance….
I think Scaramanga is still missing something with this:
A decade ago I would have agreed with him, but now I don’t think so. Biblical literalism is itself a symptom, not a root cause. It’s a justification used by certain believers to rationalize their own shitty behavior to other believers as a way to put them on the spot for their own “squishy” beliefs.
The problem is that some people – perhaps even the majority of people – are assholes. And they will use any rationale they can find to justify their behavior. If religion is handy for them, they’ll use religion. If they’re atheists, they’ll use science or philosophy. If they’re wallowing in pop culture they’ll use pop culture references. It literally doesn’t matter – assholes will find some way to justify their bad behavior if they need to.
(Scaramanga is closer to the mark than Coyne is, though. Coyne is so far off the mark he’s in fantasy land. Anyone who thinks that problems would be solved if religion just disappeared overnight is not dealing with the real world. If religion disappeared overnight our conflicts would still be there, we’d just find different justifications for them.)
We all agree that all creation myths are crap but not all lead to human cruelty. Wiccans have creation myths but on the whole people who follow this faith are less likely to be homophobic. Also what about secular societies that condone homophobia such as in Russia or China. Evolution is more likely to be accepted in those societies but because of leftover mental baggage from communism (ie. beliefs that homosexuality was a product of fascism or the evil bourgeoisie), homophobia thrives.
Yes, creationist fundies are more likely to be homophobic and misogynistic but I think the root problem is far deeper. It lies at the heart of anyone who is a bigot. It’s about hating people just because they’re different and any ideology (religious or secular) can be used to justify that behavior.
@35 ragdish
Wait, wait…are you seriously saying Russia is a secular society? O_O
@36 azhael
My information is based on this statement from an article in the Atlantic “Why is Russia So Homophobic”:
Interestingly, Russians buck a major trend in modern homophobia: more religious countries are far more likely to be less accepting of homosexuality. But Russia and China seem to reject both God and gays. Russia ranks as one of the least devout countries on earth, with only 33 percent of Russians saying religion was very important in their daily life in 2009.
Here’s the link for the full article http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/why-is-russia-so-homophobic/276817/
This is so wrong.
Evolutionary biology is critical in medicine and agriculture. This only matters if you eat and want to live a long, healthy life.
1. Our agriculture systems which feed 7.2 billion people rely on evolution of plants and animals. They’ve been very successful or we wouldn’t be here.
2. It’s a bedrock fact in medicine. The Darwinian ladder between anti-microbials and pathogens and constantly evolving and sometimes novel pathogens is just a background we all deal with.
Cancer is a somatic cell evolution disease. It will kill 100 milliion of the 300 million people alive today. This fact informs our treatment strategies.
I’d be figuratively dead without the TOE. Many of you and maybe me, would literally be dead without it.
I used to ask this question and never, ever got a reply from the Oogedy Boogedy xians.
Science feeds 7.2 billion people, lifespans are 30 years longer in the USA than even 100 years ago. It created our modern civilization which is characterized by things that do stuff using energy.
What has fundie xianity/creationism done for us humans?
Nothing at all. Other than beat up and fire a few evolutionary biologists, it is just baggage being dragged along behind our society and holding us back.
I would remove the “If” and “then”, but this will make a great quote for future reference and sums things up rather nicely.
ragdish@37,
“Secularity” is not a unitary concept. Your own linked article says:
Science? No, it doesn’t do that. You mean scientists? I’m fairly sure a scientist has never literally fed me, since my parents both had other kinds of occupations…. It hasn’t been a regular occurrence, at any rate.
How could we tell what that’s supposed to mean, as well as whether it’s true or false? The fact is that organisms have eaten things, with no help from scientists, for as long as they’ve been around — nothing very special about that.
Modern fertilizers and medicine and so forth? Sure, that’s the work of scientists and engineers, all of those big important people who do everything everywhere. Simply having food? Definitely not.
While we’re on the subject, how about that overpopulation thingy the kids are talking about these days? Who or what should get credit for that?
The entire physical universe is “characterized by things that do stuff using energy.” If you were going to characterize modern civilization (on Earth, presumably), you’d want to be a bit more specific than that. But science and scientists also aren’t wholly responsible for even that piddly little bit of existence. No, seriously: you didn’t build that.
Not to pick on you in particular, raven. This conversation has been … I don’t know, “nauseating” may be the right word … so I guess I picked an easy target for now.
@raven
There’s a few ways this could be answered.
-They could say that religion provides the bedrock for civilization and therefore the scientists couldn’t have accomplished it without civilization
-They could say that those scientists and such were inspired by religion and God and therefore religion should also get credit for science’s accomplishments
-They could say that humans wouldn’t have any purpose, ambition, or charity without religion, and therefore science owes positive things to religion
Obviously any response is going to follow the same formula: Disregard differences between fundamentalist religion with more liberal variants and have religion co-opt scientific accomplishments.
@41 Nick Gotts
I agree. There are secularists in England who identify with the Church of England. But how much is the Bible playing a direct role among Russians in driving their homophobia? 32% of Russians believe in evolution without any guiding hand from God (http://blogs.sciencemag.org/origins/2009/07/evolution-theory-and-religious.html).In the US, 32% of Americans accept evolution via natural selection but 24% feel the process was guided by God (http://www.pewforum.org/2013/12/30/publics-views-on-human-evolution/). The proportion of Russians who uphold a truly scientific account of human origins is far greater. Yet 80% of them believe that homosexuality is a disease (http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/the-roots-of-russia-s-homophobia/485634.html).
@0, PZ Myers
Misogyny and homophobia seems more directly policy issues — how “ought” various people be treated. In contrast, creationism seems an “is” position — a failed conjecture on the empirical world.
The unification would seem to be from Religions’ habitual willingness to encompass both “is” and “ought” questions. Evolution thus becomes a two-fold threat. First, eroding trust on one topic seems to weaken trust more broadly; when the perceived unreliability of religion for “is” questions rises, perception of unreliability of “ought” also would tend to rise. Second, religion generally argues these “ought” positions not only relying on specious is-ought bridges, but often bridges starting from bad “is” positions; undermining the descriptive “is” starting premise thus erodes support for the prescriptive “ought” conclusions as well.
Thus, while misogyny and homophobia may (loosely speaking) be more directly harmful, dislodging creationism has potential for broader impact.
Contrariwise, there’s a catch hidden there — dislodging one bad basis doesn’t guarantee that an alternative specious “ought” justification won’t rapidly be adopted to replace the prior rationalization. (Caveat praedicor?) I’d far prefer the feminist-friendly social justice humanist atheists triumph over the MRA-friendly social dominance Randite atheists, but the arguments of the former seem in need of selected mutations for… resilience? Something like that.
Nohow, I’m surprised that Coyne is so upset by “schisms” among atheists; diversification and speciation are commonplace in evolutionary biology. (But would this be closest to being allopatric, peripatric, parapatric or sympatric speciation?)
Peripatric. Basically, the Internet doesn’t allow anything else.
@cedrus
From what little I know, the Christian bible says near nothing about abortion. What little it does say is that it emphatically supports abortion – in cases of a husband who suspects his
propertywife of cheating. The husband goes to the priest, and the priest gives her a poison which effects an abortion. If the wife is innocent the poison only causes an abortion. If the wife is guilty, then the wife becomes infertile. It’s all spelled out in great detail in Numbers 5.…
@jerthebarbarian
I cannot agree. This problem is not genetic when it affects such a large swath of various populations. It is cultural. It is learned. Maybe you mean that being an asshole is a learned behavior, and I might agree, but then I disagree with some nuance and implication of what you just wrote. Religion perpetuates the culture which teaches young kids to be assholes. Republican culture also teaches young kids to be assholes.
A lot of the problems would go away. Most? I don’t know. We would make definite headway on some issues though.