The Daily Kos recently interviewed biologist and blogger P.Z. Myers of the University of Minnesota. Myers, who has a reputation as an acidulous, no-holds-barred polemicist, says this:
Religion is a clumsy farrago of myths and wishful thinking and old traditions which is irrelevant to our understanding of reality, and in fact often impedes our understanding. We lose nothing if it goes away. As people recognize its lack of utility, something that often (but not necessarily) happens as we learn more about science, it fades away. It's like Santa Claus -- as we learned more about how the real world works and how our parents fulfill all the roles of the fat old myth, we don't mind seeing it go away.
I don't need to preach atheism -- all I need to do is point out the palpable structure of reality in the growing detail science provides for us, and those who are awake and aware will notice the disparity between the world around them and the clumsy, sterile, ludicrous fantasies of religion, and they'll eventually abandon faith.
What professor Myers in his naivete overlooks is that man can't live without faith in something. If traditional Christianity is relegated to anthropological museums something else will surely take its place. Over the last two centuries, in the West, the substitute has been naturalistic humanism. The Bolsheviks, for example, sought to eradicate Christianity from the Soviet Union and replace it with the atheistic religion of communism, a form of humanism. People like Myers wish to eliminate Christianity and replace it with scientistic humanism, or something similar.
Unfortunately, for the secularists, naturalistic religions are not adequate to the task of investing man with meaning and purpose. Unless there is a serious hope for an afterlife this life is utterly pointless. Death annihilates everything, including meaningfulness and the recognition of the abject futility of life leads men to despair and nihilism.
Moreover, unless there is a transcendent moral authority, a moral lawgiver superior to man, there is no basis whatsoever for believing that anyone ought to behave in one way rather than another. There is no right or wrong behavior, only behaviors that people prefer to others. Man can't live that way and retain his freedom. The belief that there is no basis for morality leads directly to the view that might makes right and that leads to political oppression and tyranny.
Furthermore, if we are simply a temporary collection of molecules there's no reason to think that any of us have any dignity or worth beyond what we choose to assign to ourselves and to each other. If, as professor Myers believes, we're simply flesh and bone machines, then wherein lies our dignity? And if we have no dignity as human beings then what is the basis for our human rights? Such rights are simply fictions with which we comfort ourselves but which have no objective existence.
The interviewer asked Dr. Myers what is wrong with the idea of Irreducible Complexity. He replied:
Poor Dr. Myers. So blinded is he by his certainty that he just couldn't be wrong about his atheism that he fails to see that his very example actually supports the conclusions of IC theorists like Michael Behe. It is true that stone arches are built all the time, or at least they were in an earlier era, and it's true that the builder employs a scaffolding to erect the structure, but the point that Myers elides is that it takes an intelligent engineer to contrive this process and to carry it out. Stone arches don't assemble themselves, nor is the scaffolding which allows for their construction assembled through purely natural processes. A bridge that was built up from the cementing together of stones without any input from an intelligent architect, as Dr. Myers says, would indeed be a miracle.
