They say that pride goeth before a fall. And if you’re Jerry Coyne, every fall goeth before an even bigger fall. The poor guy just never learns. Show him that he’s shot himself in one foot, and in response he’ll shout “Lock and load!” and commence blasting away at the other one. It seems the author of Why Evolution is True has got it into his head that a Darwin Award is something it would be goodto win. And this week he’s made another try for the prize.
But first some background. Recently we witnessed Coyne badly embarrass himself when attempting to defend Lawrence Krauss against some criticisms I had leveled against him. As I demonstrated in the post linked to, Coyne commits a battery of logical fallacies -- poisoning the well, red herring, non sequitur, special pleading, and straw man -- makes category mistakes, uses language sloppily where precision is called for, badly misrepresents the views of his opponents, and is breathtakingly ignorant of what the writers he confidently dismisses actually say. He even confuses me with William Lane Craig. In a follow-up post I demonstrated that Coyne has been peddling the same shameless misrepresentations of his opponents for four years now -- despite multiple corrections of the record, and despite the fact that some of his own atheist readers have begged him to cut it out. (As we saw, one of those readers got banned from Coyne’s blog.)
You don’t have to sympathize with my views to see the awfulness of Coyne’s performance. Commenting on Coyne’s “diatribe” and my response to it, Coyne’s fellow atheist Jeff Lowder concluded, at the Secular Outpost:
If I were to sum up Feser’s reply in one word, it would be, “Ouch!” I think Feser’s reply is simply devastating to Coyne and I found myself in agreement with most of his points.
My onetime sparring partner Eric MacDonald -- who was once an ally of Coyne’s and whose advice Coyne acknowledges in his recent book Faith vs. Fact, but who has now distanced himself from the New Atheism -- wrote in response to Lowder:
I have said very much the same kinds of things about Coyne, and was asked to go elsewhere if I had any criticisms to make (which is not a sign of intellectual honesty in itself), though he did not outright "ban" me…
I must say that, having left the narrow confines of Coyne's outlook, I have been greatly helped by Professor Feser's careful reading and argument, something that Coyne could not be accused of.
And now, it seems, even Coyne himself has realized the magnitude of his humiliation. Not that he has responded to, or even commented on, the criticisms I raised in those two recent posts. On the contrary, he has for more than a couple of weeks now been strangely silent about that. Instead, this week he has, out of the blue, posted a weird rant about a six month old article of mine criticizing David Bentley Hart’s view that dogs and other fauna go to heaven. Apparently the biologist, materialist, and staunch atheist Coyne thinks I’m a complete idiot for taking the view that there is no afterlife for animals. Wrap your head around that one.
But actually, it’s not so hard to understand Coyne’s sudden interest. The guy is as transparent as an air guitar, and only ever manages to make himself look as silly as someone playing one. Here’s my hypothesis: Coyne is irked that I made him look like a fool. (Or rather, that I pointed out how he’d make himself look like a fool.) Payback is called for. But Coyne can’t actually answer the criticisms I raised in my posts, because they’re unanswerable, and because drawing his readers’ attention to them will only exacerbate his embarrassment rather than remedy it. So, Coyne decided to try something else. Trawling the web for something he might use as a diversion, he came upon my exchange with Hart. Bingo! Tossing this red meat into the monkey cage that is Coyne’s combox would be the perfect way to distract attention from the fiasco of several weeks ago:
Nothing to see over there, folks. Really, I mean it, nothing. C’mon, stop looking already. Oh, but hey, look over here! Check out these two guys arguing about animals in heaven! Can you believe it?! I said animals in heaven! No really, look over here! Isn’t this just hilarious?! Really just fall-on-the-floor funny, right? Right?!
Am I warm, Jer?
Per the Iron Law of New Atheist literature, it only gets worse. Coyne complains that I do not establish in my article about Hart that there is any such thing as an afterlife in the first place, whether for animals or for anyone else. Of course, that was not the point of the article; it would require separate argumentation, which I have provided elsewhere. Yet when I do direct readers to other places where I have developed such arguments, Coyne accuses me of engaging in self-promotion.
This is all very childish, of course, but it is standard New Atheist shtick: If an opponent doesn’t answer absolutely every possible objectionin one short article, accuse him of not having established anything. If he does respond to many objections or addresses any one of them at length, accuse him of being long-winded. If instead he refers to other writings where the issues are treated in greater depth, accuse him of evading the issue, or of trying to sell books. If he complains about this farcical “heads I win tails you lose” procedure, accuse him of being thin-skinned and unwilling to take criticism. A pretty crude rhetorical trick, but an effective one with the dumber sort of secularists who form Coyne’s base, who are only interested in the latest Two Minutes Hate anyway, rather than in having a serious discussion.
Naturally, Coyne also repeatedly accuses me -- as he ritualistically does absolutely every theist, no matter how many and detailed his arguments are -- of having “no evidence” and of “just making stuff up.” Then absurdly -- and, in good Jerry Coyne fashion, without seeing that he has just contradicted himself -- he admits that in fact I do give arguments for my views, but that they are in an article of mine that he says he will not bother actually to read. (The article is “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought,” which appeared in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly a few years ago and is reprinted in my anthology Neo-Scholastic Essays.)
As goes without saying for Coyne readers, this doesn’t stop Coyne from leveling various objections to the arguments he says he won’t bother reading -- objections I’ve answered many times in various places, including the very article Coyne refuses to read. But then, this is (as longtime readers will recall) a man who once wrote over 5000 words attacking a book (by Hart) which he admitted he had not actually read -- and in the course of doing so, and with no trace of irony, accused the book’s authorof having had his “intelligence… blatantly coopted and corrupted to prove what [he] has decided is true beforehand”!
Yes, dear reader, behold the mind of Jerry Coyne -- of a man who explicitly refuses to read what his opponents have actually said, but will nevertheless attack at length the arguments he guesses they must be giving, and who in the same breath will insist that it is those opponents who refuse to look at actual “evidence” and who “make things up.”
Well, that is itself evidence for you, though only further evidence of what has already been massively confirmed, viz. that Coyne is a Walter Mitty atheist if ever there was one!