With his blog Why Evolution Is True and now a new book pushing atheism, our old friend Jerry Coyne, Censor of the Year for 2014, provides a perennial source of interest and entertainment. The National Geographic Society must think that if one censor is good, two is better. They featured both Coyne and Neil deGrasse Tyson, Censor of the Year for 2015, in the same article recently.

Since Simon Worrall at National Geographic decided to pitch only softballs to Coyne, we have a few follow-up questions we would like to ask.

Jerry Coyne, author of Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible was in high school listening to the Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album when he had an epiphany: God does not exist. The thought terrified him. But his subsequent work as a geneticist and evolutionary biologist gave him a scientific foundation for his teenage conversion. [Emphasis added.]

Q: Dr. Coyne, are you telling us that your atheism was not a discovery of science, but was rather some kind of emotional or spiritual experience induced by rock music? Are you saying you built your house of atheism before laying its foundation?

Talking from the University of Chicago, where he is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, he explains why new scientific discoveries are undermining the claims of religion; why Stephen Jay Gould was wrong; and how U.S. law is not doing enough to protect children from being martyrs to their parents’ faith.

Q: Isn’t “religion” a hopelessly broad term here, rendering the phrase “the claims of religion” meaningless? Did you exercise any faith when you had your conversion to atheism?

I was in high school when the Sgt. Pepper’s album came out. I was lying on my parents’ couch listening to this new album and all of a sudden it just popped into my mind that everything I’d been taught about God and religion had no evidence behind it. I started sweating, but not because of the heat. I always thought there must be an afterlife. And the sudden realization that that probably wasn’t true made me start shaking and sweating. Ever since then I’ve been an atheist.

Q: Is this your scientific method, to listen to pop music and then run with ideas that jump into your mind? Since your atheism came prior to any evidential support, how can we be sure you are not using science now to undergird this belief that popped into your mind?

Worrall asks, “How have new developments in science like neurobiology or cosmology affected our understanding of the universe and our place in it?”

They support what Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate in physics, said: “The more we learn about the universe, the more we realize how pointless it is.” We’re learning a lot about the universe and what we are seeing is that it’s all a naturalistic process.

Q: So what is your point? Can a point emerge from pointlessness?

One of the theories about how the universe came to be, the big bang theory, is that it happened naturally in a quantum vacuum. That undercuts religion right there [Laughs]. People say, “You can’t get a universe from nothing. You’ve gotta have God.” But you can, if you conceive of nothing as the quantum vacuum of outer space.

Q: Dr. Coyne, could you tell us why a mindless big bang would not simultaneously undercut atheism and every belief about anything, including science? Does the quantum vacuum of outer space have properties? If so, isn’t that “something” rather than nothing? Where did the quantum vacuum come from? How do you avoid the infinite regress? You just “conceived” a notion; is that conception made of atoms?

Another is free will: the idea that at any point in time all alternatives are open to us…. Science is starting to undercut this, by showing that there’s only one choice we can make, which is the output of our materialistic brains. We are creatures of physics, made of molecules. Therefore, our thoughts and behaviors are also the results of molecular motions.

Q: Dr. Coyne, did you say these things of your own free will? If your thoughts consist of nothing but molecular motions, how do you know they are true?

You get the idea. A few well-placed questions would make for a much more interesting conversation. The only place in the article that gets lively is the conflict between Coyne’s ideas about the incompatibility of science and religion and those of the late Stephen Jay Gould. Worrall asks Coyne what he thinks of Gould’s NOMA concept (non-overlapping magisteria) that tried to keep religion and science in separate domains. As a compromise, can he accept it?

Well, no! [Laughs] It’s not only a compromise I can’t accept. It’s a compromise that’s been rejected by most theologians, who insist that morals and values be anchored in statements about how the universe is. In that sense, they’re opposed to the limitations of religion that Gould set for them. Philosophers have also rejected Gould’s idea that meaning, morals and values are the purview of religion. There’s a long tradition of secular humanism in philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks and passing through Kant, John Stewart Mill and Hume to contemporary thinkers like Peter Singer. So, on both counts, I think NOMA fails.

Oh, the questions that come to mind! (Is philosophy made of atoms? Is morality made of atoms? If religion is so off-base, why are you citing theologians? etc.)

This is where Neil de Grasse Tyson comes in. Worrall inserts a video clip (recorded earlier) where Tyson (who, by the way, has said he’s an agnostic not an atheist) continues the meme that science and religion are opposites, but Tyson seems to be more of a NOMA guy. He argues that scientists don’t tell churches what to teach, so religious people shouldn’t tell scientists what to teach in science classrooms. (Of course, he’s right about that.) Tyson seems to forget that all Americans, as citizens, are stakeholders in public education; scientists do not “own” the science classroom. It is certainly legitimate for school boards to consider the philosophical and evidential claims made in the name of science, particularly when a religious view (atheism) is allowed to present a whitewashed version of origins using claims that are contested by mainstream science.

Tyson also repeats the idea (often promulgated by Bill Nye) that unless we teach science (by which they mean evolution) free of religious opposition, America will lose its capacity to innovate and compete in the world. Actually, some of the most intriguing innovation these days comes from biomimetics, the imitation of nature’s designs — a very ID-friendly motivation. As usual, these remarks commit the either-or fallacy (that religion and science are ironclad domains at war), the generalities fallacy (that all religions are alike), the non-sequitur fallacy (that teaching evolution as a scientific idea like others, subject to debate, would threaten America’s scientific leadership), and the association fallacy (that ID is religious).

Worrall’s last questions to Jerry Coyne come the closest to challenging on anything. “A purposeless, purely physical universe, in which human life is accidental and human consciousness is what you call ‘a neuronal illusion,’ is a bleak vision, isn’t it?”

I suppose it might be to some people. I live with it and most Europeans live with it. It’s a vision that there’s nothing beyond the laws of physics and matter. Whether you find that bleak or not depends on your psychological constitution. Are people in Scandinavia or France dragging their heels with their heads down because they find a life without God bleak? No. In fact, you could make the opposite claim. For many Muslims fun is not allowed. Music is prohibited. I would find that kind of life far bleaker than a life without God.

Q: So it’s a vision, not a scientific discovery? Is bleakness a property of matter? Is fun a property of matter?

You could have loads of fun asking the questions Worrall didn’t ask. Dr. Coyne, you admitted that religious people are in the majority. Doesn’t that imply, according to your own evolutionary principles, that natural selection made them the fittest? Wouldn’t that imply that atheists are maladapted?

And what does atheism have to do with geography again?

Image: National Geographic Society Administration Building, by AgnosticPreachersKid (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons.