Just for the sake of keeping track of the twins’ escalating malice and finger-pointing and vindictiveness, let’s have a look at something they teasingly call ‘A Call for Peace in the Science/Faith Battle’ (hahahaha that’s a good one when you see how they go about it). They wrote it in late July, touchingly, for a column at Beliefnet called ‘Science and the Sacred’ which is normally reserved for the boffins at BioLogos.

They start off by saying ‘the supposed “conflict” between science and religion’ is so unnecessary, but they don’t waste much time on saying that because they’d so much rather get down to saying how awful the “New” atheists are yet again. The latest ‘incarnation’ of the … Read the rest

Russell checks in on the twins.

I join with Jason and others in objecting to the metaphors of violence that the twins have taken to using whenever they characterise the actions or speech of the people they have constructed as opponents – all those horrible “New Atheists”, such as Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. More specifically still, I object to the over-the-top language that has been used to describe the views of the small number of people who have, relatively recently, protested the more religion-friendly statements made on behalf of the the National Center for Science Education (NCSE).

Quite. I think the metaphors of violence have been steadily increasing in the twins’ articles lately; my guess is that that’s … Read the rest

Bryan Appleyard cuts through all the verbiage and sets everyone straight with just a few words – nineteen words, to be exact.

…the new, militant atheism of Richard Dawkins and friends…The disputes didn’t amount to much then and they don’t amount to much now. Put it like this: it is blindingly obvious that claims about a spiritual reality can neither be proved nor disproved by material means. End of argument.

End of argument! So tidy! Except for the tiny little fact that proving and disproving don’t exhaust the possibilities, so there is argument after all. Quite a lot of it, in fact. So much for ‘End of argument’ – and for bossy attempts to end arguments.

In order to make