Coyne: the Good Atheist

It seems that the institutional philosophers either are stuck in institutional thinking with its attendant fallacies or they maybe have time to write books but not think things through. For whatever reason some of them just can’t rid themselves of fallacies which they use over and over for proofs. A favorite is the False Dichotomy Fallacy. A true dichotomy has one option available; either choose it or don’t – two choices are all that are available.

The False Dichotomy offers two options which are diametrically opposed and which seem to be all the choices that are available, both of which are uncomfortable. But with two options, say P and Q, there are actually four ways to choose: P and Q; P and not Q; Q and not P; not P and not Q.

The deception which philosophers and other manipulators use is to present only two of the four possible choices. For P and Q, then, only the choices P and not Q, and Q and not P are presented as the available choices.

This then is the deception in Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma, which Jerry Coyne takes as the "logical" basis for dismissing a deity, disregarding the False Dichotomy Fallacy that his logic is based upon. Coyne is trying to make the case that Atheists are Good while God is Bad, which is the new argument being made by Atheists who are attacking the modern civilization in which they live.

Moving to Evil God, Coyne maintains that the Old Testament God did all sorts of things that he, Coyne, and the Atheists think are bad. Now God did order some things done that only a deity could justify, no argument there. But if a deity is justified in doing what ever a deity does, then Coyne has no case other than his own pique. Says Coyne:

” Now, few of us see genocide or stoning as moral, so Christians and Jews pass over those parts of the Bible with judicious silence. But that's just the point. There is something else — some other source of morality — that supersedes biblical commands. When religious people pick and choose their morality from Scripture, they clearly do so based on extrareligious notions of what's moral.”

What the Bible displays is a continuous cycling of obedience, betrayal, and correction. The correction is purposely visited upon a disobedient society by the use of an invading force which brings humility where hubris and contempt had reigned. And this after explicit warnings of what was to come. If one assumes these to be literally true, which Atheists always do, it is clearly the deity’s prerogative to handle his creation as he wishes. But this action, being that of the diety, is neither moral nor immoral in terms of human behavior. By taking on the Bible, Coyne should be obligated to at least understand its meanings and to use a meaningful model to criticize rather than his own fake model. Morality in human terms, according to the Bible, means obedience to the directives given by the deity. Now Coyne might not like the directives, and he might be tempted to compare the specific directives for action to the general directives for daily behavior and then declare his False Dichotomy. But as a declared intellectual he should act in dispassionate fairness when he passes judgment, rather than present False Dichotomies and Straw Man arguments. He does not, however, do that.

This is total blindness to the concept of a deity which is actually more powerful than Coyne is himself. Morality doesn’t come from the daily maunderings of institutional intellectuals; if it even exists it comes from an extrahuman source. The morals of intellectuals have never been consistent, and much less when put into practice have they been humane. Coyne’s argument against God and for Atheist Goodness cannot withstand the most cursory historical glance at the 20th century. Ah, say Atheists, that was coincidentally Atheists slaughtering hundreds of millions of their own countrymen, purely coincidence. In other words, excusing their own belief system for its slaughters.

But as fatally feeble as those arguments are, Coyne’s weakest argument is yet to come:

” Further, the idea that morality is divinely inspired doesn't jibe with the fact that religiously based ethics have changed profoundly over time. Slavery was once defended by churches on scriptural grounds; now it's seen as grossly immoral. Mormons barred blacks from the priesthood, also on religious grounds, until church leaders had a convenient "revelation" to the contrary in 1978. Catholics once had a list of books considered immoral to read; they did away with that in 1966. Did these adjustments occur because God changed His mind? No, they came from secular improvements in morality that forced religion to clean up its act.”

Religious people continue to improve or at least change their understanding of the deity and its wishes for them. Coyne conveniently ignores that it was the religious efforts of uberChristian William Wilberforce in Great Britain, and the Republicans in the USA that put slavery away – not the force of “secular improvements”. Taking credit for what one did not accomplish is intellectually dishonest, and none of the events he listed was forced by any secular superhero.

Coyne predictably defaults to the Atheist’s religious source, evolution:

” So where does morality come from, if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning. Despite the notion that beasts behave bestially, scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing — even notions of fairness. This is exactly what we'd expect if human morality, like many other behaviors, is built partly on the genes of our ancestors.”

First the absurdity of asserting that “secular reasoning” and Chimpanzee behavior are in the same category as morality is absolutely glaring. But let’s take evolution first: making up evolutionary Just So Stories just doesn’t cut it any more, but Coyne hasn’t gotten the memo. I’m sure he will some day.

But “secular reasoning” as a source of anything meaningful at all is the most absurd premise that can be made. Secular reasoning eschews any absolutes, so it has to base its premise support either on infinite regressions of subpremises, or on circular regression back to itself. Either way it cannot provide any firm grounding for… well, for any valid thought whatsoever, much less a guide for moral human behavior. This is the world in which the secular philosopher moralists live, a world which they make up and then want us to believe is real. For them maybe it is real, but I doubt it, because they do not actually live in the world they pretend is real.

And that is a true dichotomy: to make up rules and reality and then either (a) to live in it, or (b) not to live in it. If one asserts rules and reality, but chooses (b), then he might be hypocritical or maybe insane.

An example is the idea that “compassion” must become a human trait if one is to be a secular moralist. But then the real idea comes to the fore: it is not compassion but confiscation of other people’s wealth to be spread around. The compassion comes not from personal sacrifice but from sacrificing the Other on the altar of secularism. Sacrificing the Other is a large part of secular thought, so it must be moral according to the seculars.

Anyone who values “secular thought” as a way toward morality is suspect. In fact, as Massimo Pigliucci recently demonstrated quite adequately, secular thought is compartmentalized into sects, each of which condemns the other secular thought sects as dealing in “mental masturbation”. They are partly right; it’s just that ALL secular thought is mental masturbation. And Coyne is right in the middle of all that. Why is Coyne “Good”? Because he says so. What is "Good"? It's whatever he says it is... today. That’s the process of secular thought.

In fact Coyne wrote a book with a title that automatically places the entire book into the mental masturbation category: Coyne wrote: “Why Evolution Is True”. Assuming that evolution is a science complete with verifiability and falsifiability and is proven to be valid, it still is not capable of providing Truth. Science provides only contingent inductive factoids, from which deductive tests can be made, which show merely that no falsification has yet occurred. No matter how many tests are done, science never ever provides Truth. Scientists might presume a factoid to be valid for purposes of subsequent tests, but they do not declare Truth if they understand the basis for science. As both a philosopher and a scientist, Coyne flunks even the basics.

But for some reason, Atheists still respect him. Maybe it’s because he says what they want to hear.

[author's note: semantic correction, 08.07.11]