The Religious Fundamentalism Among Us

As a general rule, those who are convinced they are free of metaphysics are those who are most beholden to metaphysics. Evolution professor and atheist P.Z. Myers once explained in an LA Times piece that he is “pretty certain that if there were an all-powerful being pulling the strings and shaping history for the benefit of human beings, the universe would look rather different than it does.” Pretty certain God wouldn’t have made this world? Myers is known for his strident views and he probably has never stopped for a moment to ponder the rather awkward question of how he knows of that certainty. For while Myers criticizes others for their religious beliefs, Myers’ notion of how the universe would and would not look if such an all-powerful being created it is, itself, a religious belief. Perhaps Myers’ certainty is at the 99% level. How did he arrive at such a value? You see whether Myer’s certainty is 99%, 98%, 90%, or whatever, does not matter. For in any case, it is a religious claim. There is no scientific experiment or evidence to back up Myers’ belief. There is no logic or rationale to which Myers could appeal. In fact not only is Myers’ criticism of religious beliefs hypocritical, but Myers own position is fallacious as it entails a massive internal contradiction. To wit, Myers concludes with atheism, but his very atheism undermines his religious claim. If atheism were true, then no religious claims could be known to be true. Simply put, religious claims would be meaningless. One could claim there is a 99% chance God would or would not do this or that, but such a claim would be worthless. Hypocrisy and irrationality are signs of the worst side of religion. He was brought up a Lutheran but Myers is now a religious fundamentalist.

And so it is something of a stretch for Myers to claim his high claims for evolution are objective, scientific conclusions. After all, if one is an atheist then evolution is pretty much the only alternative.

In fact Myers irrationality was on further display this week when he wrote that he is certain of evolution because it “occurred” and after all, it hasn’t been falsified:

I am certain that evolution occurred. The evidence is in; the process occurred and is occurring, there are no known barriers to natural processes producing modern life from proto-life/chemistry over the course of 3.8 billion years, and all the evidence we do have shows modern forms being incrementally modified versions of earlier forms. We don’t know all the details, of course, and just maybe someone somewhere could discover a real hurdle that could not have been overcome without intelligent aid, but I know for a fact that no creationist has ever come up with a defensible objection, and that nearly all the creationists who pontificate so ponderously on the impossibility of biology, Plantinga among them, always turn out to be profoundly ignorant of the science. There’s a good inverse correlation between knowledge of biology and certainty that evolution can’t work.

Notice the irrational leap evolutionists always take. In science theories are not true simply because they have not been disproven, but Darwin changed all that. These days Myers and evolutionists operate from a very low burden. Evolution is a fact unless it is falsified to their satisfaction.

So while evolution fails one prediction after another, and while evolutionists are continually surprised by the evidence, and while evolutionists cannot even come close to explaining how evolution occurred, Myers nonetheless is convinced. After all, the process occurred and no creationist has ever falsified it.

Myers is a beholden to his metaphysics. He is a religious fundamentalist and his fundamentalism has led to him to the age-old sophistry that everything must have arisen from nothing, and that’s a fact.