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Never forget that the smarter and more knowledgeable act put on by many atheists is inevitably nothing more than that, an act, and one that has absolutely no basis in empirical reality except for a three-point average advantage in IQ which is almost surely a statistical artifact of their insignificant numbers and self-selected identification. Do ANY of them, from the Antipope of Oxford on down, know even the first thing about history? Here’s a lovely example:

WorldNetDaily columnist Vox Day bends over backwards to argue that James Watson’s recent criticism is worse than the Spanish Inquisition’s threats of torture against Galileo. Seriously.

I wouldn’t think a great deal of bending is required in order to establish that simple fact. Seriously. Monty Python had it right, no doubt Galileo wasn’t expecting them! And, I wonder, to whom has James Watson been directing his criticism of late?

On a related note, Chad the Elder quotes David Hart’s piece on the decline of intelligent atheism: “The utter inconsequentiality of contemporary atheism is a social and spiritual catastrophe. Something splendid and irreplaceable has taken leave of our culture–some great moral and intellectual capacity that once inspired the more heroic expressions of belief and unbelief alike. Skepticism and atheism are, at least in their highest manifestations, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions, and even the most fervent of believers should acknowledge that both are often inspired by a profound moral alarm at evil and suffering, at the corruption of religious institutions, at psychological terrorism, at injustices either prompted or abetted by religious doctrines, at arid dogmatisms and inane fideisms, and at worldly power wielded in the name of otherworldly goods. In the best kinds of unbelief, there is something of the moral grandeur of the prophets–a deep and admirable abhorrence of those vicious idolatries that enslave minds and justify our worst cruelties.”

And now we have the spectacle of Dawkinsian atheism, which warns of how a revival of the Spanish Inquisition’s terrible witchburnings during the Thirty Years War, which cost Galileo, Bruno, and Sarah Good their lives at the siege of Jerusalem, poses an imminent threat to science.

It would appear I am not the only one who has noticed. David B. Hart’s highly amusing essay at First Things pours disdain on the best efforts of a murder of atheists to rationalize their neurosociological shortcomings in public:

Take, for instance, the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God. Certainly that was my hope in picking it up. Instead, I came away from the whole drab assemblage of preachments and preenings feeling rather as if I had just left a large banquet at which I had been made to dine entirely on crushed ice and water vapor.

To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed. Some of the writers exhibit a measure of wholesome tentativeness in making their cases, and as a rule the quality of the essays is inversely proportionate to the air of authority their authors affect. For this reason, the philosophers—who are no better than their fellow contributors at reasoning, but who have better training in giving even specious arguments some appearance of systematic form—tend to come off as the most insufferable contributors….

The scientists fare almost as poorly. Among these, Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The contributors drawn from other fields offer nothing better. The Amazing Randi, being a magician, knows that there is quite a lot of credulity out there. The historian of science Michael Shermer notes that there are many, many different and even contradictory systems of belief. The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.

You really have to have read several of the New Atheist books to fully comprehend the astonishing lack of intellect, knowledge, and reason on offer. And I note with great amusement that the utter speciousness of Richard Dawkins’s “unrebuttable” argument does not go unremarked.

“But something worse than mere misunderstanding lies at the base of Dawkins’ own special version of the argument from infinite regress—a version in which he takes a pride of almost maternal fierceness…. But all the evidence suggests that Dawkins has never understood the point being made, and it is his unfortunate habit contemptuously to dismiss as meaningless concepts whose meanings elude him. Frankly, going solely on the record of his published work, it would be rash to assume that Dawkins has ever learned how to reason his way to the end of a simple syllogism.
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It would be rash indeed. The “unrebuttable” Ultimate 747 argument, which Dawkins himself declares is the central argument of The God Delusion isn’t just wrong, it is provably wrong at multiple steps along the way. To say that it “scarcely rises to the level of nonsense” is almost too kind. This is precisely why so many intelligent individuals, religious and irreligious, have contempt for Richard Dawkins and why Dawkins has largely abandoned all debate. Having fooled a number of moderately intelligent people into thinking that he knows what he is talking about, he is now desperate to avoid being exposed for the charlatan and logical incompetent that he quite clearly and demonstrably is.