And guess why? From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views:
Writing in the Washington Post, Harvard astronomer Howard Smith forcefully blunts Stephen Hawking’s assertion that “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.” Of course, it’s not only Dr. Hawking who says as much — denying human exceptionalism is close to universal orthodoxy among the socio-academic demographic he occupies. Carl Sagan put the same view a little more mildly: “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star.”
Smith points out, however, that science considered objectively is much closer to the exceptionalist conclusion.
Sure, but…
Atheists aren’t having any of it. At Why Evolution Is True, biologist Jerry Coyne hits back, complaining that Smith doesn’t confess right up front that he is in fact, as Smith himself has written elsewhere, an observant Jew. Coyne frets that Smith is a “religious Jew who spends his time reconciling science with the mystical tenets of the Kaballah.” Actually from his bio it appears that Smith spends his time working as a “lecturer in the Harvard University Department of Astronomy and a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.” Coyne, a retired academic who spends a fair amount of his own time posting pictures and videos of cute cats, rants … More.
Ranting about religion is socially okay if one is an atheist like Coyne. In fact, organizing persecutions against declared non-atheists is okay. Those are the rules accepted among our opinion leaders, including hordes of compliant church-going dhimmis. They secretly assume that being an atheist and a Darwin defender proves that Coyne is smart. They never stop to wonder what else Coyne has going for him. Unless, of course, Darwinian atheism is the latest new branch of science.
All that said, one rather wishes people did not attach as much importance to being published in the Washington Post. Woodward and Bernstein are long retired and the paper is the hobby of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Books will be written about the way in which traditional media like the Post are demonstrating an utter inability to grasp what is happening in their historic areas of competence, such as reading American voters’ opinions, 2016. Never mind sponsoring a serious discussion of the universe.
A person with ideas worth listening to, like Smith, should really publish with people with a better current track record. Just a thought.
See also: Mathematics: “Particle collisions are somehow linked to mathematical ‘motives.’”
“There is a connection from nature to algebraic geometry and periods, and with hindsight, it’s not a coincidence,” said Dirk Kreimer, a physicist at Humboldt University in Berlin.
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