Attacking the Disease, Not the Symptoms

Every time yet another christianist apologist comes up with a new reason why atheists and other members of the reality-based community should just let the freakazoids continue to poison civilization with their lethal superstitions, PZ Myers is there to knock it down.

This week, the subject was the interconnectedness of religion and Intelligent Design:

I would argue that one reason that astrology (and religion) haven't gone away is that people like the answers they provide, even if they're wrong, and that celebration of wishful thinking is an epidemic in the populace. And one reason it persists is that we have a significant number of our citizens dutifully trotting into churches every Sunday, where they are told by solemn authorities that the universe loves them personally, and look, here's an old book reassuring us that it is so. Religion is a cultural parasite that weakens our intellectual immune system, and opens the door to lots of other opportunistic infections. Jesus cults and astrology and scientology and snake oil and the Secret and quantum woo are the Kaposi's sarcoma of a deeper disease—faith.

We're just now beginning the process of rooting out the causal agents of that disease, and what we need to do is promote more intellectual hygiene, like skepticism, which is the rational equivalent of washing your hands. The wishy-washy, ridiculous theism that Giberson promotes echoes the medieval scholars who tried to argue that bathing was a nasty habit.

Giberson doesn't want that. We're supposed to endorse one version of humbuggery, religion, while deploring another, ID, all in the name of keeping everyone comfortable in their prejudices, no matter how erroneous.

If the scientific community wants to dislodge ID, they need to start by admitting that their efforts have been an abysmal failure so far. And then they need to turn their considerable analytical skills on the problem of explaining that failure. If they do this, they might discover that enthusiastic pronouncements like "ID is dead" or "science has proven God does not exist" or "religion is stupid" or "creationists are insane" are not effective. They might discover that affirming that the universe is wonderful, despite our bad backs and the nonsense in our genomes, makes it easier for people to accept the bad design in nature.

And above all, they need to decide that it is OK for people to believe in God. For millions of Americans belief in ID is tied to belief in God. Unless people can find a way to separate them -- and not be told by agnostic bloggers this is impossible -- ID's coffin will remain empty.

Yes, we godless scientists are often affirming the wonderful qualities of the universe. But, and this is an important distinction, we do so by discussing what is real, not the awesomeness of some imaginary phantasm that the theists want us to worship. We are not going to succeed at getting people to embrace reality if some dufus in a clerical collar keeps trying to insert some ridiculous proxy he calls a god into our understanding, and further, insists that we can really only appreciate physics and chemistry and biology if we deeply adore a particular dead prophet.

ID and a belief in gods are all tangled together, and they are inseparable. Killing one requires killing the other, and it seems to me that only the atheists are recommending the practical approach of tossing out the whole religious package with its attendant absurdities, and rebuilding an ethical, rational vision of the world that does not require any supernatural bullshit at all.

Read the whole thing.