“A former 40 year atheist” rips the hell out of my post (and book chapter) Good Without Gods.
I was smarting under all this expert flaying until I looked at some of his other posts.
Challenge to Atheists: Prove that there is no God
In this last one, there’s a response by the author to a reader comment (emphasis mine):
Evolution is one of the secular holy tenets, which will destroy you if you touch it. No evolution doubter is allowed to instruct or to publish. Evolution is the third rail, which must not be touched. What makes it so? Why is any “science” Holy? It is not the purely inferential conclusions that are drawn from single instances of existence. It is not the empirical data (which does not exist).
…
This is why the ACLU will spend millions on defending evolution against all comers; it is why Atheists choose evolution as their mantra. The idea that there is no creator to have bestowed any human rights on humans has just one justification: evolution. It is the dogma of the statists.
This is the bit that always catches my attention: If you’re mounting a spitting attack on scientists (or atheists) for some sort of philosophical or factual wrongdoing while simultaneously USING THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION, you’re basically saying “The stuff you believe is just as stupid as the stuff I believe. You’re making the same mistake I make.”
It’s like yelling over the fence at your neighbor, “Hey, dog owner! Your dog SHITS IN THE YARD!! Just like mine does!”
What makes it so is the utility of the theory for social engineering in the Nietzschean/Dewey/Alinski tradition. The influence on society of this non-empirical science is due to its devaluation of humans to animal levels, and the “Will To Power” which accompanies that, not its negligible influence on biology.
Well, but there are also us evil environmentalists who take the reverse tack — raising animals to human levels. You know, insisting that chimps and elephants and wolves (for instance) have the right to survive.
But evolution has no…NO…scientific merit of the empirical variety. It is purely extrapolative, speculative, inferential story manufacturing. The vaunted science has only speculation to back it up.
So I will continue to poke at the nakedness of this non-empirical emperor. It is not a closed case. It cannot prove its speculations. If it were not tied to a social agenda it would not be allowed by reasonable scientists to be elevated to the secular deification it now enjoys.
I can almost see this one brave man, a “former 40 year atheist” who has seen the light of Jesus, blogging into the night so the darkness of atheism and evolution will not topple Western Civilization.
Gah.