Author: Ophelia Benson

I wasn’t going to inflict any more Mooney-Kirshenbaum nonsense on you, but now Mooney (at least) has taken a couple more steps further into the moral slime, and I feel it My Duty to record the fact. I think it’s time to declare Chris Mooney officially morally bankrupt. He’s not just wrong – he’s doing bad things.

On that post I criticized on Monday, a commenter announced that I was lying.

When Ophelia Benson claims through her “questions” that Chris and Sheril have no evidence she is not telling the truth. It’s one thing for people who haven’t read the book to assert this – she has the book.
So let me say that again and more emphatically: She is lying.

Here is the question from her own site: “How do you know overt atheism causes people to be hostile to science? How does that work? What is your evidence?”
From page 173 to page 185 there are detailed endnotes with citations to back up the assertions in Chapter 8. [details of citations] It’s one thing to disagree with the premises the authors put forward. That’s fine – you’ve provided links to reasonable reviews that do disagree with parts of your book.

Benson doesn’t just disagree. She lies and asserts that they have nothing to back up their assertions.

You know (if you’re regular readers, at least) how loaded that language is. You know we don’t allow people to use that language here because it could get us (or, worse, just Jeremy) sued. That fact hints at a certain moral weight to the language. That’s not news – duels have been fought and brawls have been brawled over such language. I take very strong exception to the accusation. The notorious flamer John Kwok repeatedly accused me of lying (on the same kinds of grounds, i.e. ridiculously flimsy) last week, and I emailed SK to say please delete (it was her thread), and she did. This time things went differently. One, I did a couple of posts denying the charge and explaining what was wrong with the claim. Two, I emailed both bloggers to say please delete.

The comments were blocked; the email was ignored.

I emailed again later, after other comments were let out of moderation and posted (one can tell because new comments appear interleaved with old ones); I also tried again to post the comments. Still nothing.

I tried to comment in reply to people addressing me, this morning, and was unable even to do that – so I tried to post a comment saying ‘Good morning. Have a nice day’ and was unable to do that. So this is the state of play: a libelous comment announcing that I am lying sits there, and my denials are blocked, and I am now apparently banned entirely.

That’s morally disgusting. And there’s no way to get it on the record other than by saying it here, so I’m saying it here. Chris Mooney is morally bankrupt.

Here are the comments I made, that Mooney won’t let me post:

It’s libelous to say that people are lying when they’re not. I’m not lying. It’s not lying to ask questions. I’ve read the endnotes (obviously), and I’ve never said that M & K don’t have references; I’ve said they don’t offer evidence or argument. So have other people. So far, M&K haven’t offered any, they’ve just repeated their assertions.

Notice I’ve never said M & K are lying. I’ve flatly contradicted them at times, for instance when they claimed that Chris “tried to engage in a civil debate with Dr. Coyne” – but I’ve never said they are lying. That’s because I don’t know that they are – for all I know they believe every word they say.

Then

“From page 173 to page 185 there are detailed endnotes with citations to back up the assertions in Chapter 8.”

I’ve just gone through them again. There are citations and some attempts at argument, but they don’t back up all the assertions in chapter 8. In particular they don’t back up the one I asked about in the question you quote. I didn’t ask ‘how do you know science and religion are compatible?’ As you point out, I asked ‘How do you know overt atheism causes people to be hostile to science? How does that work? What is your evidence?’ The citations and attempts at argument in the endnotes don’t back up that assertion. It looks to me as if M and K think that assertion is so self-evidently true that they didn’t need to back it up – in other words that it never occurred to them to back it up because it never occurred to them that it was an assertion. They appear to think it’s just an obvious fact.

That’s it. As you can see – there’s nothing salacious or blasphemous or libelous, or even rude or repetitive or conspicuously tedious, at least not compared to comments by several regulars there. Yet I’m not allowed to say it – even though it is in response to a baseless charge that I am lying.

To repeat – this is morally disgusting.

Barbara Drescher tells another story of Mooney’s Short Way With Dissenters.

(I’m not including SK in this because she did delete the accusations of lying last week.)

Eric MacDonald made a comment that needs to be on the main page:

In their little piece on civility, where Barbara Forrest is quoted as saying “Be nice”, Mooney and Kirshenbaum say this:

Religion is a very private matter, and given that liberal religionists support church-state separation, we really have no business questioning their personal way of making meaning of the world.

This is false. Religion is not a very private matter. It is a very public matter, and it is increasingly more and more public. How people make sense of the world, religiously, almost always seeks to impose itself on others.

Religion does not respect boundaries. For a long time it was thought that religion had retreated to the private sphere, but it had not. Religious priorities were still reflected in law and social custom, but as soon as these came to be questioned, and in many cases overturned, religions began, once again, to strive to re-establish the religious ‘foundations’ of the culture. The introduction of an unreconstructed Islam into jurisdictions traditionally dominated by Christianity has led to renewed attempts to reassert Christian dominance.

The same thing is happening with respect to science. It is astonishing and disturbing to see someone with the apparent stature (in the scientific community) of Francis Collins making childish arguments for the consistency of science and (what turns out to be a gasp-makingly conservative form of) Christianity. This should be seen as a very deep cultural crisis. By all means tell religious yarns if you are afraid of the dark, but don’t bring them into scientific contexts, as though they had anything of value to offer. They don’t. In fact, what they offer, as Jerry Coyne points out, is only a blurring of boundaries.

Religion does not respect boundaries. Like any other form of monolithism religion is quite prepared to mix private and public, empiricism with superstition, law with personal choice. If M&K don’t understand this, then they do not understand religion and its dangers. It is a danger to anything that requires critical thinking. There is no place for humility or even etiquette here, whether or not science can or cannot prove a negative. What science can and should say is that it has no need of this hypothesis. In fact, I would hazard the guess that if there is a problem about scientific literacy, this is related to the fact that, for many, religion provides the illusion of knowing already. Making it clear that religion is something private – as private as poetry and considerably less helpful – and that the only reliable ways of knowing involve critical rationality and empirical evidence, might help to separate things that, in public discourse, are too often conflated.

Gould was wrong about NOMA, but he had the right idea. Religion needs to be put in its place. It has no relation to science whatsoever, and, despite its claims to the contrary, no special moral authority. Once this is clearly understood, the religious are free to tell each other stories, if it helps them get through the night. They may even imagine, in private, that they are talking about real things, but there is no reason for others to believe this, and lots of reasons why others should insist, and insist again, that religions must know their limits, and that they should not be taken seriously when they try to speak with a public voice.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum have struck again. They’ve written a piece on their blog telling some entity unattractively called ‘the New Atheist blogosphere’ why TNAB is wrong and M&K are right. It’s a repulsive read, because (as usual but more so) it’s so willfully blind, so obstinately determined not to heed reasonable objections but instead to ‘frame’ them as irrational outbursts from Declared Enemies.

They’ve created this bind for themselves, of course. They spent a large chunk of their very short book blaming ‘New Atheists’ for American ignorance of science, and then labeled all criticism as coming from ‘New Atheists’ and therefore (in ways not always specified) tainted and wrong and thus safe to ignore. The problem there is that they’re getting criticism from some very clever and knowledgeable people, so they’re ignoring criticism that they really (for the sake of their cognitive health, though perhaps not for the reputation of their book) should pay attention to.

But they’re not, and in the process of not, they are misrepresenting both themselves and their critics – which causes their critics to think even less of them. This is not because of some ‘New Atheist’ cognitive distortion.

For several months, Chris tried to engage in a civil debate with Dr. Coyne about the merits of “accommodationism.”

Chris did no such thing. ‘Engage in a civil debate with Dr. Coyne’ is exactly what Chris did not do. Chris made arbitrary random assertions about the need for greater ‘civility’ and cited Coyne as someone who needed to be more civil.

Forrest eloquently defended this view in the first half of her talk; but in the second, she also challenged the latest secularist to start a ruckus–Jerry Coyne, who I’ve criticized before. In a recent New Republic book review, Coyne took on Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson, two scientists who reconcile science and religion in their own lives. Basically, Forrest’s point was that while Coyne may be right that there’s no good reason to believe in the supernatural, he’s very misguided about strategy. Especially when we have the religious right to worry about, why is he criticizing people like Miller and Giberson for their attempts to reconcile modern science and religion?

Many people asked what exactly he meant, and he never replied. That is not ‘trying to engage in a civil debate’ – it’s accusing someone of something and then refusing to elaborate or justify the accusation.

He became concerned a few weeks back, though, after posting (along with a few supporting words) a video of Eugenie Scott talking about science-religion compatibility. Merely for posting this video, Coyne accused Chris of “dissembling” and “using authority arguments.” Scott was also accused of dissembling—simply for making an argument she believes in.

Coyne did no such thing. Coyne wrote a long and considered post pointing out that Mooney was simply repeating the old accusation without having taken in the intervening objections. That does not remotely translate to ‘merely for posting this video.’

And so on. Needless to say, things don’t improve as they go on. This is why a lot of people disagree with M&K – it’s not because we all live in a box with ‘New Atheists’ painted over the door.