No Compromise on the Truth

Earlier this year, biologist and outspoken atheist @PZMyers served on a panel debating whether science should confront or accomodate religion.

Myers spoke passionately on why scientists, atheists and other members of the reality-based community must fight religion at every turn.

From Free Inquiry magazine:

There is another theme in this conflict: new atheists are so dang angry. Damned right we are. The real question is why everyone else isn’t. If you aren’t angry about what’s being done to undermine education in this country, you haven’t been paying attention!

But we also respond rationally. My early incredulity about the nonsense being promoted by creationists was followed by a lot of fact-finding. You can do it, too—look up the history of creationism, and you’ll find that we’ve been fighting this same battle for at least half a century, dealing with the same inane arguments over and over again.

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The sea in which our country is drowning is a raging religiosity, wave after wave of ignorant arguments and ideological absurdities, tired dogma tirelessly pushed by fervent but frustrated fanatics. We keep hearing that the answer is to find the still waters of a more moderate faith, but I’m sorry: I don’t feel like drowning there either.

There is an answer. The only long-term solution is the sanity of secularism. The lesser struggles—to keep silly stickers off our textbooks or to keep pseudoscientific intelligent design out of our classrooms—are important, but they are also endless chores. At some point we just have to stop pandering to the ideological noise that spawns these unending tasks and cut right to the source: religion.

That’s where the new atheists get their confrontational reputation. We’re fed up with fighting off the symptoms. We need to address the disease. And if you’re one of those people trying to defend superstition and quivering in fear at the idea of taking on a majority that believes in foolishness, urging us to continue slapping bandages on the blight of faith, well then, you’re part of the problem—and we’ll probably do something utterly dreadful, like be rude to you or write some cutting, sarcastic essay to mock your position. That is our métier, after all.

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And that makes us uncivil and rude, because we challenge the truth of religion.

Religion provides solace to millions, we are told: it makes them happy, and it’s mostly harmless. “But is it true?” we ask, as if it matters.

The religious are the majority, we hear over and over again, and we need to be pragmatic and diplomatic in dealing with them. “But is what they believe true?” we ask. Then we follow up with: “What do we gain by compromising on reality?”

Religion isn’t the problem, they claim—it’s only the extremists and zealots and weirdos. The majority of believers are moderates and even share some values with us. “But is a moderate superstition true?” we repeat, following up with, “How can a myth be made more true if its proponents are simply calmer in stating it?”

I mean, it’s nice that most Christians aren’t out chanting “God hates fags” and are a little embarrassed when some yokel whines that he didn’t come from no monkey, but they still go out and quietly vote against gay and lesbian rights, and they still sit at home while their school boards set fire to good science.

It’s all about the truth. And all the evidence is crystal clear: the Earth is far older than six thousand years. Evolution is a real process built on raw chance driven by the brutal engines of selection. And there is no sign of a loving, personal god, just billions of years of pitiless winnowing without any direction other than short-term survival and reproduction. It’s not pretty, it’s not consoling, it doesn’t sanctify virginity or tell you that God really loves your foreskin, but it’s got one soaring virtue that trumps all the others: it’s true.

You won’t understand what the new atheists are up to until you understand that core value. I have been told that my position won’t win the creationist court cases; do you think I care? I did not become a scientist because I want to impress lawyers. I have been told that I must think promoting atheism is more important than promoting good science education. Tell me how closing my eyes to claims of an imaginary deity using quantum indeterminacy to shape human evolution helps students better understand reality. I’ve been told to hush; there are good Christians who support science, and a vocal atheism will scare them away. I have to ask: why do you question my support for science education and then pander to people who you admit will put their superstitions above science if someone says a harsh word about Jesus?

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One of the most common canards applied to us, and especially to the new atheists, is that we’re negative, that we lack a positive center that we stand for. This is completely false. When you look at the body of work that the prominent leaders of this movement have put together, when you look at the books of people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, Jerry Coyne, and Victor Stenger, you do not find them nattering on for hundreds of pages about how much they hate religion. Quite the contrary. What you find are authors writing about reason and evidence and science; in their works you find front and center an appreciation for a universe rich with natural phenomena that, with a little honest effort, we can reach out and comprehend. We atheists live a purpose-driven life, to steal a phrase, and that life is dedicated to deepening our understanding and learning about this world. Call us merely negative, or merely angry, or merely antireligious, and you haven’t been paying attention. You haven’t been reading our books or articles for comprehension.

What may have confused some people, though, is that we also believe you can’t love the truth without detesting lies. We believe that an honest way of dealing with those lies is to confront them openly, head-on, and unapologetically. While some might rationalize accommodating unjustifiable distortions of the truth as a strategic option, there are a number of us who consider that principle to be one on which we will not compromise.

Yes, of course there is a political lesson here for liberals. Pretending that people who want to turn this country into Dark Ages Europe are capable of reason and compromise is as stupid and self-defeating as pretending that people who think an invisible sky wizard magicked the world into existence 6,000 years ago are qualified to teach science.

What matters is what's true. Tax cuts don't increase revenues, reduce deficits or create jobs. They never have and they never will, not matter how much the repugs repeat the lie.

Stop being nice. Tell the truth. Fight the lies.