Christian culture warriors will make regular appearances on this blog, since nearly everything they say is embarrassing rubbish. Today, consider Dr. Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon who fancies himself a scholar and a scientist. (As do his fawning admirers, the duped masses of the multiply-misnamed Intelligent Design Movement.)
Dr. Egnor appears to be rather displeased by the existence of atheists, and he's downright pissed off by the recent uptick in atheist uppity-ness. Jerry Coyne, a top evolutionary biologist and uppity atheist, wrote a blog post about "atheist humility." Coyne cites a recent letter to the editor in the New York Times, in which the writer decries a lack of humility on both sides of this religious culture war, and claims that such humility is "necessary for serious engagement." Coyne thinks this is bosh, and I agree:
I may be mistaken, but I think we’re already doing serious engagement. It’s fatuous to think that if only both sides became more “humble,” we’d arrive at some welcome compromise. And what would that be? Presumably, atheists would stop their vociferous criticism of religion, while religion could continue business as usual. In other words, the status quo.
Dr. Egnor begs to differ. He doesn't think atheists have been humble at all, because they've killed millions and millions and millions and millions of people whenever they've been "in power."
Now let's just pretend that it's really true that there were "65 million dead from Atheism in People's Republic of China." First off, what in hell does this have to do with atheist "humility?" Coyne's point is that in the West, atheists have tended to live and let live in the culture. If Engor aims to dispute this, he needs different data.
But second, what is it with Christians who think that they can score culture-war goals by stacking corpses at the door of Atheism*? Even if Atheism could be described coherently as being responsible for enormous quantities of Death and Destruction, Christendom would have the much bigger problem. Because similar lists of deaths (and other horrors) attributable to Christianity are easy to compile and far more difficult to explain. Killing and other Bad Things are, after all, the fruits of fallen humans. That humans do these things, in numbers great and small, is unremarkable. Tallying the score is unnecessary and says nothing about whether atheists are "humble" or even evil.
No, what Egnor would have to do to score goals in this silly match is this: show that Christian faith has lessened Death and Destruction, ideally when Atheism has not. Smugly reciting body counts – even if they weren't obscenely inflated and misattributed – merely invites the devastating counterpoint: Christian faith has created horrors all its own.
This is one big reason why I'm a Christian atheist. Egnor is a fool, but worse, his arguments are self-incriminating. Why is it that our world isn't so much better off for having so many Christians?
* It's quite silly to talk about some cabal called Atheism, but that's what Egnor and his ilk love to do, and I do think it looks amusing in print.
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