Civil War in the leper colony.

Bart Ehrman's book on "Did Jesus Exist?" - which, not to bury the lede, is answered in the affirmative - has kicked off a civil war on the liberal/radical/crazy side of the scholarship/pseudo-scholarship continuum. (This Huffington Post column appears to be the proximate cause of the war.) There are a lot of hurt feelings out there as the "Jesus is a Myth" ("Mythers") go-to guy, Richard Carrier, expresses personal umbrage at the attack on his scholarship. Ehrman has responded in kind. Other folks have weighed in.

Good times, good times.

Apparently, based on his vast knowledge of grasshoppers gleaned from teaching teen-agers at a state school in Morris, Minnesota, P.Z. Myers - best known for using his state-funded gig at the University of Minnisota, Morris to offend Catholics by desecrating the Eucharist - has magisterially weighed in to defend Carrier's scholarly reputation.

This is what Myers has to say:

Jesus is a legend, like King Arthur or Robin Hood or Paul Bunyan. There may have been some individual in the past who inspired the stories, but he’s not part of the historical record, and the tall tales built around him almost certainly bear little resemblance to the long-lost reality. It’s simply bad history to invent rationalizations for an undocumented mystery figure from the distant past.

Well, then, there you go. Case closed. A guy who works for the government in teachign pimple faced teenagers all about animalsin a village of approximately 5,000 souls in western Minnesota has exerised the "magisterium of science" to tell us what's-what about history.

Myers' magisterial pronouncement has resulted in this terrific putdown by R. Joseph Hoffman:

I’ll make a deal with PZ Myers: I don’t try to lecture him on grasshoppers and he doesn’t lecture anybody on Jesus and “bad history.” I can’t quite imagine that the combined religion faculties at Harvard, Claremont and Tuebingen are awaiting further instruction on Bayes Theorem from Richard Carrier or packing up their offices, having been served notice that an associate professor of biology at the Morris campus of the University of Wisconsin has discovered that Jesus is just like Robin Hood—and Paul Bunyan. I know it gives the mythtics a rush to think that the scholarly establishment discourages revolutionary ideas but in fact it is designed to discourage error and non-revolutionary discredited ideas.

And:

The free thought rabble have chosen Carrier as their standard bearer, without any reason to put their trust in his inane conclusions and methods—a man who has never published a significant piece of biblical scholarship, never been peer reviewed (peers?), never been vetted, and never held an academic position. His “reputation” depends on deflecting his mirror image of himself as a misunderstood, self-construed genius onto a few dozen equally maladroit followers. This billboard for poor method, we are now asked to believe by freethought’s bad boy, PZ Myers, has cold-cocked a senior New Testament scholar for saying something as reasonable as “Jesus existed.” Only in the age of instant misinformation and net-attack is this kind of idiocy possible. Only in the atheist universe where the major premise– “religion is a lie so the study of religion is a study of lying”—infects everything is this kind of lunacy possible. Unfortunately, we have Richard Dawkins to thank for the original formulation of that premise.

Let's sit back and enjoy the digital blood-letting.

Angry Atheists, part 2.

David Klinghoffer dissects P.Z. Myers bullying response to Biology post-grad Jonathon McLatchie.

Let's say you had no opinion on evolution and no background in evolutionary developmental biology but were simply presented with a video of this exchange. What would it tell you about the character of the individuals involved and the respective strength of their positions?


The exchange is between an older man, heavy and bearded, hardly a distinguished scholar but a professor nonetheless who's a popular writer on atheism and science, speaking before an adoring audience at a Glasgow pub; and on the other hand, a physically slight young man setting out to embark on his own professional training in the same field. The young man is earnest and nervous. He talks a little too fast and seems unaccustomed to public jousting. The older man, on being challenged, is bullying, abusive, and personally insulting.

Is this the way an educator behaves when he's got the truth on his side? As the exchange proceeds and the young man tries to formulate responses despite continuing jeers and shouts from a crowd of other bullies all around him, you can just feel the poor guy's heart galloping in his chest. In his place, that's how I would feel.

Yet putting feelings aside and considering it as a specimen of scientific discussion, the interchange is telling. When Jonathan references a sheaf of peer-reviewed research papers he has brought with him, Myers mocks him for it. Presumably, if he offered no documentation, he would have been mocked for that too. When Jonathan fully articulates his challenge, Myers ridicules him for going on too long. When Jonathan compresses it to a sentence, Myers mule-headedly misrepresents what Jonathan is asking. In his prodigious written posts here, including a recent response to P.Z. Myers, Jonathan has already amply demonstrated that, despite his youth, he is impressively on top of his subject matter.

Again, does this sound like the professor has science on his side? To me, it sounds like a secular version of the old stereotype of the domineering, oppressive religious-school teacher who tolerated no questioning and gave faith a bad name.

I keep emphasizing Jonathan's youth contrasted with Myers's age and, in the eyes of this audience of so-called Glasgow Skeptics anyway, his status. That's because there is something outstandingly contemptible about such abuse in a case like this where it's being directed so clearly down the ladder of rank.

And:

So too in other situations where there's a power differential. In an employment context, if you want to try intimidating your boss or supervisor and see how far you get, you're a fool and will have to learn that for yourself when you get fired. However there's nothing morally contemptible about it, as there would be when the intimidation is aimed downward in the opposite direction.


You can see how Myers plays it up for the audience not by straightforwardly answering Jonathan's challenge or correcting his misconceptions but by ridiculing and intimidating him. The next questioner timidly apologizes for asking what she says she's afraid may be a "stupid question," but this time Myers is gentle and accepting because she, unlike Jonathan, hasn't actually challenged Myers or his views.

So I return to the question I began with. Is this how they educate young people at the good old U. of Minn. Morris? It's a highly effective way of enforcing groupthink, which is why Myers has advocated it to fellow Darwinists, but what about as a method of honest pedagogy? You may question your professor in order to get clear in your mind and thus to accept and digest his opinions -- that's OK. But if you question him and intimate that you're not entirely convinced that he's right in what he teaches -- if you are, in a word, a skeptic -- then you can count on being met with a barrage of obscenity and abuse.

Contrast this with William Lane Craig's invariably direct responses to atheist challenges.  Craig habitually treats the question as sincere and responds to the gist of the question, long after I would lose patience with the explicit taunting in which the question is phrased.

But the question of "what are they teaching at the good-old U of M, Morris?" is totally fair.  Recall that Myers is the guy who desecrated a eucharist in order to show his contempt for the feelings of others. For him, teaching is clearly a species of indoctrination.

Reviewing my files, I noticed that the point that Myers' missionary efforts are more likely to convert people to Creationism has been made before, by none other than paleontologist Robert Bakker.
From this interview, here is an excerpt:

[Switek] Finally, as someone who works with the "bones of contention" and the fossil record, what do you think about the current controversy surrounding evolution in the United States? How can we do a better job of communicating science to the public?

[Bakker] We dino-scientists have a great responsibility: our subject matter attracts kids better than any other, except rocket-science. What's the greatest enemy of science education in the U.S.?

Militant Creationism?

No way. It's the loud, strident, elitist anti-creationists. The likes of Richard Dawkins and his colleagues.

These shrill uber-Darwinists come across as insultingly dismissive of any and all religious traditions. If you're not an atheist, then you must be illiterate or stupid and, possibly, a danger to yourself and others.

As many commentators have noted, in televised debates, these Darwinists seem devoid of joy or humor, except a haughty delight in looking down their noses. Dawkinsian screeds are sermons to the choir; the message pleases only those already convinced. Dawkins wins no converts from the majority of U.S. parents who still honor a Biblical tradition. Hitchcock is a far better model. He had his battles with skepticism. He did worry that the discovery of Deep Time would upset the good people of his congregation. But Hitchcock could view three thousand years of scriptural tradition and see much of value - and much concordance with Jurassic geology.