Even funnier than Sarah Palin.

A Turkish game show is challenging atheists to reassess their views and win “the biggest prize ever”. Penitents Compete will bring together an Islamic imam, a Jewish rabbi, a Buddhist monk and a Greek Orthodox priest seeking to convert the atheists. The prize for any converted contestants is an expenses-paid pilgrimage to a holy site of their chosen faith.

But that’s not a prize unless you do in fact convert, so it’s not going to function as a prize for the people who are supposed to convert because they won’t want the thing offered – it won’t appeal to them – in fact it will repel them. It’s like saying the prize is a … Read the rest

Chris Mooney (yes, it’s not over after all) disagrees with Jerry Coyne (and by extension me, and Austin Cline, and anyone else who has made the same point) about what the Pew report tells us about the putative compatibility of science and religion.

Let me say at the outset that I find it regrettable, just as Dr. Coyne does, that people are rejecting scientific findings due to their religion. That’s not cool. It’s not acceptable. And it is of course one of the key reasons we have an “unscientific America.”

But where Coyne sees sheer science-religion incompatibility, I see something else: An opportunity. For it seems to me that if we could only dislodge the idea that evolution is contradictory

Guess who’s back – why, it’s Madeleine Bunting. ‘What’s she up to now?’ you cry in pleased surprise. She’s going out of her way to show us how silly she can be, yet again.

There is a school of thought that the new atheists have so polarised the debate about the relationship between science and religion that it’s not a conversation worth having. The “Ditchkins” – as Terry Eagleton describes them in his recent book – have developed such a crude argument about religion based on their boasted ignorance of the thinking which underpins belief that it’s hard to know how a dialogue is possible.

‘School of thought’ – she means herself saying it, and Terry Eagleton saying it, … Read the rest

We’ve seen that Mooney and Kirshenbaum claim that ‘faith and science are perfectly compatible.’

Austin Cline has a very helpful post explaining how this is done.

Chris Mooney regularly insists that all he wants is to promote the “pragmatic” position that science and religion are compatible. He doesn’t want critics of religion and theism to “shut up,” he just doesn’t want them to keep being so publicly critical. This differs from shutting up in that… well, Chris Mooney can’t quite explain how it differs. But it does, really. You can trust him on that.
As a demonstration of just how trustworthy Chris Mooney is, as well as a demonstration of just what he he thinks “framing” is all about,

Moving on.

Scientists as a group are more secular than ‘the rest of the nation.’ Religion is an emotional matter. Creationists fear that evolution [the subject, not evolution itself] will ‘undermine their religious culture.’

Abrasive atheism can only exacerbate this anxiety and reinforce the misimpression that scientific inquiry leads inevitably to the erosion of religion and values. [p. 100]

They apparently mean ‘abrasive atheism’ of scientists there, but they failed to specify that, which is one problem throughout – a constant tendency to overbroaden their claims and confuse the issue. As it stands the claim is nonsensical – ‘abrasive’ atheism as such can only exacerbate fear of evolution? Well, possibly, but it’s not obvious how CM and SK know that. … Read the rest