When Jewish Atheists Attack
By David Klinghoffer
At his website Why Evolution Is True, Jewish atheist and U. of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne (left) has responded in two posts to my own entry on Chanukah, knee pain, and suboptimal design in creatures as a bogus argument for atheism. (As an aside, note the gentleman's last name. I'm guessing it started out as Cohen, meaning that he is presumably a cohen, a descendant of Aaron. In Ashkenazic pronunciation the Hebrew name often comes out as coyne. Pending information to the contrary, take a moment to appreciate the irony of his illustrious priestly lineage.) Professor Coyne is full of "Aha's!" and "Gotcha's!"
He writes:
[T]he "bad designs" [in creatures] are more than just random flaws in the "design" of organisms: they are flaws that are explicable only if those organisms had evolved from ancestors that were different.
Why do cave fish have nonfunctional eyes? That's bad design for sure. You could impute it to the quirks of God, but isn't it more parsimonious to conclude (and we know this independently from molecular data) that those fish evolved from fully-eyed fish that lived above the ground?
No doubt about it. Life has a history. It has been changing in the forms it takes for a very long time and some of that history is inscribed on it, as artifacts of its development. Creatures give birth to other creatures in a chain of descent. They have a lineage, just like cohanim. Some of these descendants enjoy advantages, others exhibit defects. Who would disagree?
A very small part of the suffering in our world can be linked to these artifacts of history. Knee pain or back pain might be examples. So what? This is an example of the classic Darwinist straw-man tactic of making it appear that intelligent design proponents doubt not only the sufficiency of natural selection in explaining life's history but that life has a history at all. In this connection, Professor Coyne berates me as a "creationist," usually taken to mean a Biblical literalist, but I am not a creationist. Words have meanings.
Yet as Coyne observes, explaining evil and suffering is of course a serious challenge to religious believers:
In the end, theodicy is the Achilles heel of religion: attempts to explain evil just make theologians look more ridiculous and unconvincing.
He therefore poses what he thinks is a devastating rebuke:
What kind of world would convince you that there is no God?
If he finds such a question meaningful, then he must answer first because I posed it first, or anyway its obverse, in my original entry. What kind of world would convince you, Jerry Coyne, or any atheist, that there is a God? No vague waving of hands, if you don't mind. No sarcastic rhetorical questions, which Professor Coyne does offer. ("I may be wrong, but couldn't God have arranged the world so that people could 'grow and change spiritually' without horrible things happening to innocents?") A straightforward reply in concrete terms would work well.
Exactly what level of evil could the hypothetical Deity -- perfectly good and all powerful -- tolerate so that his existence retained the advantage of being plausible to you? I argued earlier that if we're going to say that God's permitting the suffering of an innocent creature is the ultimate and conclusive point in favor of disbelief in him, then that would have to include any such suffering, any at all. If leukemia in children would cross the line, what about arthritis in senior citizens? Remember we're talking about a God without limits on his goodness and power. If he's got no excuse for a lot of undeserved pain in the world, he's got no excuse for any.
If Jerry Coyne is consistent with his premise, then the only world into which he should be willing to admit God is the perfect and perfectly boring and insipid turtle terrarium that I described, a place that no God that I can imagine would bother to create in the first place.
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...of Mr. Klinghoffer to draw attention to this online debate with Prof. Coyne. I scored it as a pretty big win for Coyne...
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/bad-design-a-theological-or-a-scientific-argument /
It does seem odd that Mr. Klinghoffer, an Orthodox Jew, claims not to be a creationist when the first of Judaism's thirteen Principles of Faith says: 'I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, is the Creator and Guide of everything that has been created; He alone has made, does make, and will make all things.' Or am I missing something?
Klinghoffer whines "I am not a creationist." Yet he works at the "Discovery Institute" (which has never discovered anything). DI aggressively promotes " intelligent design " which has been thoroughly examined and found to be... creationism . So, Klinghoffer IS a creationist. While not directly anti-semitic, his attacks on Coyne are repugnant. And his argument for the existence of " god " actually much better serve to disprove it.
The late, great Joseph Campbell got it in his writings. All religions are essentially the same when you look at the big picture. There are no thematic differences. The differences between faiths lay/lie in the details. Read his arguments. If you have an open mind, you will understand. He never really says that this system is better than that system.
Now, to get down to anthropocentrism. Human kind is essentially an egocentric entity. We think we are superior, therefore we are. We create things that support our self-esteem. Perhaps, we (as a species) have low self-esteem and need to puff ourselves up by creating faiths which support our self-perceived heroism and superiority. Who knows? Perhaps the Supreme Being is really our psychotherapist.
Atheists are finding their own solution. I would let them be who they want to be.
What's with the gratuitous anti-semitic-sounding comments about Coyne's name? What does his name have to do with your argument, really? What does him being Jewish have to do with your argument? You really detract from the seriousness of your argument when you impugn him on the basis of his ethnicity.
Mr. Klinghoffer was speculating on Mr. Coyne's possible ancestral link to Aaron the Levite, a figure in the Hebrew Bible. Aaron was the first High Priest of Israel, and his descendants have always occupied that post. The point of the comment was not to detract from Mr. Coyne's argument based on his Jewish heritage, but to say it was sad and ironic that someone descended from a noble line, one at the heart of the Jewish faith, would be an advocate of the ideas he professes.
This is kind of like when we see the child of a well respected person getting in trouble and commenting what a shame it is that someone from such a good family is not living up to that family's reputation. It's irrelevant to the discussion at hand, but interesting none the less.
A quick additional note, Mr. Klinghoffer is well known for being a practicing Orthodox Jew, so accusing him of antisemitism is rather ludicrous.
No, I completely understood the fact that "Cohen" means "priest of the Aaronic line" in Hebrew. My point was that Klinghoffer failed to demonstrate the relevancy of Coyne's ethnicity to his argument attempting to discredit Coyne's views. I was unaware that Klinghoffer is, himself, Jewish, but that does not by any means prove that Coyne's ethnicity is relevant to his argument against Coyne's views on theism. Judaism, after all, is not exclusively a religion . It is an ethnicity, and the assumption that two people of the same ethnicity must, perforce, share the same religious views is a fallacy.