Sexual Freedom, Erotic Impulses, and the Intellectuals

“For myself, as for no doubt most of my contemporaries, the essence of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation…
“We objected to morality because it interferes with our sexual freedom…

“The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world.” Aldous Huxley[1]

by Jonas E. Alexis

Last summer must have been really hot for Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine and co-author of the popular book Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?

During that summer, biologist and militant atheist PZ Myers of the University of Minnesota posted on his blog that Shermer might actually be a rapist. I kid you not.

But Myers was not the only person to make this allegation. Other fellow atheists and skeptics kept implying the same thing.

James Randi of the Educational Foundation and a member of the Skeptic magazine itself declared,

“I know enough women who have been harassed by @BTRadford [Benjamin Radford] and @michaelshermer to know it’s not ‘gossip.’”

Fellow militant atheist Richard Carrier conceived the point that

“It’s possible Shermer has a habit of getting women drunk and having sex with them (or trying to). Several people online claim to have witnessed his skirt-chasing in general (even propositioning a married woman while her husband was elsewhere in the same room) and evidence of his propensity to have multiple simultaneous ongoing affairs (some of which one source claims his wife eventually became aware and was looking online for others…

“I’ve been hearing other rumors like this for years, so this isn’t a suddenly new thing. It’s just spilling out into public now….

“I have seen enough evidence to establish, in my own mind, at least a 50.1% chance that Shermer has not just cheated or fooled around, but has left a wake of victimized women in his path, that he has not conducted himself morally, and that he is probably not good or safe company (especially for women). ”

There are numerous sexual allegations online by groups of people saying the same thing about Shermer and other skeptics.

In August of last year, skeptic and linguist Karen Stollznow complained in the Scientific American that she was “sexually harassed for four years”[2] by fellow skeptics. One of those skeptics turned out to be Benjamin Radford.[3]

Rebecca Watson, founder of Skepchick, has lamented that rape threats has become a problem in the skeptic community. She declared that some fellow skeptics “try to get in the pants of every woman who walks through the door.” And then this:

“And then I would make a comment about how there could really be more women in the community, and the responses from my fellow skeptics and atheists ranged from ‘No, they’re not logical like us,’ to ‘Yes, so we can fu$k them!’

“And then, for the past few years as the audience for Skepchick and SGU grew, I’ve had more and more messages from men who tell me what they’d like to do to me, sexually. More and more men touching me without permission at conferences.

“More and more threats of rape from those who don’t agree with me, even from those who consider themselves skeptics and atheists. More and more people telling me to shut up and go back to talking about Bigfoot and other topics that really matter.”

Citing another friend of hers, atheist Jen McCreight complained, “I was fairly surprised though, when DJ turned to me and said that the reason everyone loved the Skepchicks was because they ‘want pussy.”

Greta Christina, a militant atheist who brags about sleeping with multiple men and women in an explicitly graphic fashion (she called that “screwing” and “fu$king” people up, a clean version of Marquis de Sade’s philosophy),[4] and author of books such as Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories about Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, and More, agrees that Shermer might be as guilty as charged.

Carrier concludes, “Shermer pursues sex with women a lot, both one-night stands and ongoing affairs, and he has often enough done so without telling his wife or his various girlfriends.

“His recent attempt to compel PZ Myers to retract his report of what a witness told him appeared to deny even this (that Shermer has lots of consensual trysts and affairs), which I think is disingenuous at this point.”

Whatever the merit of these accusations, Myers and others must have known the legal implications of those claims. Myers started out by saying,

“I’ve been given this rather…explosive…information. It’s a direct report of unethical behavior by a big name in the skeptical community (yeah, like that hasn’t been happening a lot lately), and it’s straight from the victim’s mouth. And it’s bad. Really bad.

“She’s torn up about it. It’s been a few years, so no law agency is going to do anything about it now; she reported it to an organization at the time, and it was dismissed. Swept under the rug. Ignored. I can imagine her sense of futility. She’s also afraid that the person who assaulted her before could try to hurt her again.”

The slugfest had begun. But before we look at some of the motives behind Shermer’s Denying History in the next article, let us hear the woman’s accusation:

“At a conference, Mr. Shermer coerced me into a position where I could not consent, and then had sex with me.

“I can’t give more details than that, as it would reveal my identity, and I am very scared that he will come after me in some way. But I wanted to share this story in case it helps anyone else ward off a similar situation from happening.

“I reached out to one organization that was involved in the event at which I was raped, and they refused to take my concerns seriously.

“Ever since, I’ve heard stories about him doing things (5 different people have directly told me they did the same to them) and wanted to just say something and warn people, and I didn’t know how. I hope this protects someone.”

The story does not end there. Other women began to line up to testify against Shermer. Another anonymous lady wrote:

“Michael Shermer was the guest of honor at an atheist event I attended in Fall 2006; I was on the Board of the group who hosted it. It’s a very short story: I got my book signed, then at the post-speech party, Shermer chatted with me at great length while refilling my wine glass repeatedly.

“I lost count of how many drinks I had. He was flirting with me and I am non-confrontational and unwilling to be rude, so I just laughed it off. He made sure my wine glass stayed full.

“And that’s the entirety of my story: Michael Shermer helped get me drunker than I normally get, and was a bit flirty. I can’t recall the details because I was intoxicated. I don’t remember how I left, but I am told that a friend took me away from the situation and home from the party.

“Note, I’d never gotten drunk at any atheist event before; I was humiliated by having gotten so drunk and even more ashamed that my friends had to cart me off before anything happened to me.

“But I had a bad taste in my mouth about Shermer’s flirtatiousness, because I’m married, and I thought he was kind of a pig. I didn’t even keep his signed book, I didn’t want it near me.

“Over the years as rumors have flown about atheist women warning each other about a lecherous author/speaker, I thought of all the authors and speakers I had met during my time as an atheist activist, and I guessed that Shermer was the one being warned against.

“Now there are tweets and blogs about his sexually inappropriate behavior as well as his fondness for getting chicks drunk, so I feel quite less alone. I don’t think he realizes he is doing anything wrong. Men who behave inappropriately sexually never think they are doing anything wrong.

“I have mixed feelings about your grenade-dropping. I have heard arguments both for and against what you did. Whether or not I agree with it, I just want to say that the accusations against Shermer match up with my personal experience with him, insofar as he seemed hellbent on helping me get drunk, and was very flirty with me. Take it for what you will. I believe the accusers.”

If those stories are really true—and I am approaching this issue from a skeptical point of view—I sympathize for those women, for sociological studies have shown us that living with the consequences or fruits of rape or something close is not a pleasant thing.[5]

But as we shall see below, Shermer’s accusers are intellectually inconsistent, philosophically incoherent, and morally contradictory.

The women who have accused Shermer are undoubtedly fellow skeptics and/or Shermer’s followers, which hypothetically means that they are familiar with Darwinian evolutionary ethics, and which means that in all probability, they also agree in one degree to another with the general concept of “survival of the fittest,” one of the central axioms of Darwinian metaphysics.[6]

If those assumptions turn out to be true, then the women, PZ Myers and other accusers are philosophically in deep trouble.

In 2012, Myers wrote unapologetically:

“The feminism I embrace is sex-positive. It includes heterosexual men and women, homosexual men and women, transmen and women, and every kink and twist you can imagine.

“It is not about controlling your sexuality, but liberating it — it most definitely does not say ‘you can’t have this kinda sex.’ It does not judge your sexual behaviors and say “Those are aaaalll [sic] wrong.”

If Shermer did rape or sexually harassed those women, wasn’t he “liberating” himself by crossing the sexual Rubicon? If he has an urge to release his libido, should he suppress it? And if he does suppress his sexual impulses, wouldn’t this be the opposite of Freudian psychoanalysis?

Furthermore, why would Myers all of a sudden drop his philosophical disquisition and intellectual promiscuity and magically appeal to a moral law which basically says that it is wrong to rape or sexually harass a person? Where did he get that principle and why should Shermer abide by it?

Myers mightily and hopelessly tried to reconcile this implicit contradiction and rescue himself from intellectual oblivion by making things even more complicated when he said:

“Because here’s the thing: you have freedom to exercise your sexuality, but that does not mean you get to impose your sexuality on others.

“If, for example, your kink is peeing on women, and you’ve got a partner whose kink is being peed upon, I’m happy for the two of you, I hope you have a grand time, but please, if I ask you not to share your stories with me because I find it unpleasant, respect my wishes…and do not imagine for one second that your desire to pee on someone trumps their desire to not be peed on.

“I’m not going to judge you or tell you what you can and can’t do in your bedroom unless you’re trying to force it on someone who is unwilling. That’s the hard and fast line you don’t get to cross. Rape is a fundamental violation of that basic principle of autonomy and respect for other people’s desires.”

Wait a minute. Isn’t Myers an evolutionary biologist? Doesn’t he know that mindless evolution, red in tooth and claw, does not provide a moral basis by which to judge this or that behavior? Shouldn’t Shermer follow evolution to its logical conclusions?

Myers—who likens religion to pornography![7]—is literally imposing his morality on Shermer. And how does he come up with his standard? Again, Myers doesn’t mince words:

“Here’s my objective, ungodly moral reasoning that I use to assess the rightness of an action. Let’s call this the basics of an objective humanist morality. Interest…

“I have never been in situation where I desire or am compelled to torture a toddler, nor can I imagine a likely scenario for such an activity. It is a non-decision; my default choice is to not torture…

“Consent. If I’m contemplating an action, I’d next consider whether all participants agree to engage in the action. If it isn’t consensual, it probably isn’t a good idea.

“Harm. I avoid behaviors that cause harm to others. Again, this is not done because an authority told me to do no harm, but is derived from self-interest and empathy.

“I do not want to be harmed, so I should not harm others. And because I, like most human beings, have empathy, seeing harm done to others causes me genuine distress.”

He’s got to be kidding. He is basically forcing his subjective moral principle upon others and then on the other side of his mouth espouses some form of moral relativism, which is logically incoherent and practically worthless.

One needn’t be a philosopher and a logician to see that his criteria are impressively risible. Perhaps he should read Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea, in which we learn that the world of meaning and value is an illusion—an implicitly meaningful statement which literally destroys the philosophical principle behind the statement.

As a corollary, if the statement is true, then it is also illusory, for claiming that everything in the world is an illusion makes such a claim worthless in itself, for both the words and the person who uttered them are merely illusion as well.

In short, we shouldn’t pay attention to the words and the person proclaiming them because they are both illusory. (Once Sartre figured out what was at stake—the main character in Nausea is Sartre himself—he actually became sick.)

There are more problems with Myers’ position, too much to detail here. I’ll let Myers quarrel with his militant “atheist” Steven Pinker of Harvard, who said:

“The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world.

“The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way.

“Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?”[8]

Perhaps it is pertinent to bring again noted atheist philosopher Michael Ruse to the moral debate. He said that morality is a biological adaptation, but it is

“no less than hands and feet and teeth…ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves.

“Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory.”[9]

Here Pinker, Ruse and others seem to weaken Shermer’s bold claim that “moral sentiments exist beyond us, as products of an impersonal force called evolution. In the same way that evolution transcends culture, morality and ethics transcend culture, because the latter are direct products of the former.”[10]

Ruse and other say that evolution does not provide a transcendent morality, but Shermer says it does, without an iota of evidence.

Socio-biological evolution tells us that evolutionary ethics are sort of “herd morality” among homo sapiens, but there is nothing, in principle, that makes them “herd morality” objective.

If morality is based on self-interest, as Myers argues, what about people who think that it is “self-interest” to rape and torture young children?

Myers may find Shermer’s behavior repulsive, but Shermer seems to be much more in line with the practical application of Darwinian principles than Myers here. It was Darwin who wrote that “Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends…”[11]

As historian of science and medicine Robert J. Richards of the University of Chicago has argued, Darwin finally realized that, in the end, it would be the survival of the fittest. Darwin declared that

“When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.”[12]

Richard comments, “Natural selection did act constantly; the war of nature was incessant.”[13]

This principle seemed to have worked in Darwin’s own family life, as he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839. They had ten children, and all of them were unhealthy.

Moreover, the Darwinian principle—and here we are talking about Social Darwinism, with its poster boy “survival of the fittest”—was not just an intellectual exercise with no practical application. It was widely promoted by numerous British intellectuals and was widely and detrimentally practiced in both England and America.[14]

If Myers hasn’t gotten a grip of this, he certainly needs to do so pretty quickly because he is losing moral ground at an alarming rate.

To cite again the famed Scottish evolutionary anatomist and anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith (1866-1955),

“We have to abandon the hope of ever attaining a universal system of ethics [because] the ways of national evolution, both in the past and in the present, are cruel, brutal, ruthless, and without mercy…”[15]

In a similar vein, Bertrand Russell postulated, “outside human desire there is no moral standard.”[16] Evolutionary biologist William B. Provine of Cornell agreed,

“There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no freewill for humans, either.”[17]

Shermer actually agrees with Provine’s last point here, that free will “is an illusion, caused by the fact that we cannot identify the cause of the awareness of our intention to act.”[18] Yet long before Shermer, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga postulated the same.[19]

Believing-Brain-Shermer-Michael-9780805091250 If free will is an illusion, then Shermer had no choice but to chase after the skirts of women at conferences because that is what his brain tells him to do. If his brain tells him to act upon his sexual fantasies and erotic imagination, he cannot control it based on reason because, according to his founding principle, he is just a robot following the dictates of his neurons. After all, his fellow skeptic Daniel Dennett tells us quite bluntly that human beings

“are made of mindless robots and nothing else, no non-physical, non-robotic ingredients at all.”[20]

Robots, by definition, do not have consciences and do not act as free agents. External entities always tell them what to do and they act on those orders.

Again jumping off his premise that we are all robotic machines rather than free agents, Dennett argues that consciousness itself is an illusion.[21] Francis Crick and others believed likewise.

Steven Pinker, who along with Dennet previewed Harris’s manuscript for The Moral Landscape,[22] also does not believe in a conscious, human-controlled mind. He states that the mind is simply “the physiological activity of the brain” and that this process goes back to the genes, which previously had been shaped by “evolutionary processes.”

In other words, there is no ultimate moral responsibility in that kind of world—and people like Sam Harris would have agreed. Citing neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, he agrees that responsibility is

“a social construct that exists in the rules of society” but “does not exist in the neuronal structures of the brain.”[23]

Quoting again Gazzaniga, Harris agrees that “in neuroscientific terms, no person is more or less responsible than any other for actions.”[24]

But Gazzaniga shoots himself in the toes when he unapologetically declared that “there is no scientific reason not to hold people accountable and responsible.”[25]

What he basically ends up saying is that there is no such thing as free will, which means that a person is not really responsible for his actions, but we should hold that person responsible! I simply do not know how these guys think that they achieve victory by locking themselves in a swamp of contradictory principles.

I would be curious to know if Shermer’s accusers also believe that human beings have no free will as well. If not, on what basis can they really accuse Shermer? If yes, doesn’t that overshadow their metaphysical principles?

What we have seen thus far is that Myers and others simply have no ontological and moral anchor for their value judgment which they are implicitly imposing on others. We have also seen that there is no Darwinian morality which is objectively binding.

Let us hear from intellectual clown Richard Dawkins once again. Notice the title of the book: River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life:

“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.

“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference…DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”[26]

If we use this Darwinian principle with respect to the rape accusations, Shermer was simply dancing to his DNA. Too bad that those women happened to get hurt in the process.

Myers does not want to come to the realization that this is where his moral philosophy will ultimately lead him because he lacks the intellectual courage that people like Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche had. Aldous Huxley wrote of de Sade’s philosophy:

“De Sade’s philosophy was the philosophy of meaninglessness carried to its logical conclusion. Life was without significance. Values were illusory and ideals merely the inventions of cunning priests and kings. Sensations and animal pleasures alone possessed reality and were alone worth living for.

“There was no reason why anyone should have the slightest consideration for anyone else. For those who found rape and murder amusing, rape and murder were fully legitimate activities.

“Why was the Marquis unable to find any value or significance in the world? Was his intellect more piercing than that of other men? Was he forced by the acuity of his vision to look through the veils of prejudice and superstition to the hideous reality behind them? We may doubt it.

“The real reason why the Marquis could see no meaning or value in the world is to be found in those descriptions of fornications, sodomies and tortures which alternate with the philosophizings of Justine and Juliette.”[27]

Nietzsche, like Dostoyevsky, had a point when he said that if God is dead, then there is no objective morality. And if there is no objective morality, like can become the truth, and truth the lie. Here’s Nietzsche:

“To be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all…”[28]

In that sense, a person could lie about rape and that would be fine.

In short, when morality is out, all hell breaks loose. Listen for example to John Maynard Keynes,

“We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists. The consequences of being found out had, of course, to be considered for what they were worth.

“But we recognized no moral obligation on us, no inner sanction, to conform or to obey. Before heaven we claim to be our own judge in our own case.”[29]

Keynes, of course, was being frank, as he was defending his homosexuality.[30]

“There are also approving witticisms in correspondence in which Keynes urged his lover and protégé Lytton Strachey to tour Tunis ‘where bed and boy are also not expensive.’ Keynes and his sexual circle often toured those nations which were well known as sexual tourism locations for Westerners interested in pederasty with child sexual slaves.

“[Keynes] and his circle embraced what they called ‘the higher sodomy’ which was based on the idea, not just that sodomy should be tolerated, but that everything else was inferior.

“The philosophy of the higher sodomy held that the highest form of human relations was one in which men of refinement, intellect, class and aesthetic superiority combined their male friendships with sexual relations.

“To go to the club and converse with men of high intellect and then to have to go home to the little woman is a lower life, a falling short of the higher sodomy…

“Then, as now, the question of homosexuality was intimately connected with the question of God. Lytton Strachey, for whom Keynes was a long-term lover, close friend and benefactor, described him as “a liberal and a sodomite, an atheist and a statistician…

“There was nothing private at all about the ‘higher sodomy:’ Strachey openly declared that the goal of their work was to take these ideas, including homosexuality, and promote them through their intellectual and literary output.”[31]

Economist Jerry Bowyer wrote in 2011 in Forbes:

“He and his fellow members of the Cambridge Apostles were firmly committed to an agenda of overthrowing every element of the Victorian society from which they had sprung.

“The rejection of thrift, or of any economic principles at all were of a piece with the rejection of any system of objective truth, any objective moral code, any form of theism and old-fashioned notions about standing up to the Germans, whether under the Kaiser or later under the Führer. In other words, the whole societal order was to be overturned.

“G.E. Moore attacked traditional philosophy and theology, Lyton Strachey’s job was to use literature to debunk Victorian principles of self-restraint, and Keynes was to demolish classical economics, sound money and the virtue of thrift. The sex was only a part of it, and probably a subordinate part of it as well.

“The apostles were committed to an ideology of the superiority of male intimacy over male/female intimacy not because they were born gay (many of them lapsed into heterosexuality once they were away from the club, some members having feigned homosexuality in order to be included in the group,) but because they saw all of Victorian society, which they hated, as a coherent whole.”[32]

Keynes, like Marx and Freud, “didn’t induce” his weltanschauung “from the data, nor deduce according to the laws of logic, he adduced it. He chose the worldview which allowed him to be the kind of man he wanted to be.”[33]

Some intellectuals, like Aldous Huxley, actually made it clear that once morality is out of the equation, sexual freedom flows logically. This was also the case for a number of writers in the Enlightenment period and all the way to the twenty-first century.

Men and women such as Lord Byron, the Shelleys, Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Gustave Flaubert, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, G. E. Moore, Margaret Sanger, and many members of the Cambridge Apostles and the Bloomsbury Group, were just following their erotic desires and sexual impulses to bitter end.

Huxley tells us that people like Lamettrie rejected morality not because of intellectual reasons but because of sexual and erotic impulses which some of them were pursuing at the time.[34]

In the same way, the Cambridge apostles regarded things like infidelity and sexual promiscuity not as “moral failings” but as philosophies to live by.[35]

Moving on to Jean Paul Sartre, he began to seduce his own female students. One observer who knew Sartre wrote,

“We all know Monsieur Sartre. He is an odd philosophy teacher who has specialized in the study of his students’ underwear.”[36]

Using sexual freedom as a vehicle to reject morality has not changed over the years. For Gore Vidal, “America’s Puritan attitudes on sex have made it ‘the dumbest country on Earth.’”

Religion, Vidal tells us, most specifically Christianity, was “a permanent enemy.”[37]

As it turned out, Vidal was simply defending his homosexual lifestyle.[38]

Stephen Hawking maybe another classic example. The Huffington Post reported two years ago:

“‘Stephen Hawking may be confined to a wheelchair, but that doesn’t seem to keep him from making the rounds. The celebrated astrophysicist is a regular at a sex club in California…

“‘I have seen Stephen Hawking at the club more than a handful of times,’ the member told the celebrity site. ‘He arrives with an entourage of nurses and assistants. Last time I saw him, he was in the back ‘play area’ lying on a bed fully clothed with two naked women gyrating all over him.’”

In London, Hawking is well-known in the London’s Stringfellows club. Peter Stringfellow, the owner of the club, declared,

“I remember asking him if he’d like to have a conversation with me about the universe or if he’d just like to watch the girls. The answer was quite simply, ‘The girls.’”

jones Finally, Shermer has a wife, but according to Darwin, it is perfectly legitimate to find sexual satisfaction elsewhere. Darwin wrote in the Descent of Man:

“There should be open competition for all men; and the most able should not be prevented by laws or customs from succeeding best and rearing the largest number of offsprings.”[39]

In short, modernity, as E. Michael Jones put it more than twenty years ago, is a form of “rationalized sexual misbehavior.” But that misbehavior would not be a surprise to G. K. Chesterton, who wrote more than fifty years ago:

“The new rebel is a Skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty…and the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything.

“For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it…

“As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is a waste of time.

“A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself.

“A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble.

“The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts.

“In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men.

“Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything, he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”[40]

Right after Myers posted the rape issue, Shermer’s attorney sent Myers a cease-and-desist letter.

Let us close this final point by asking a simple question: what if Michael Shermer was a priest? Wouldn’t Richard Dawkins call for his arrest? Didn’t Dawkins plan a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested in 2010? Dawkins wrote then:

“A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds; a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part; a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.”

Let us just say that the Pope is guilty of all those charges, most particularly the infallibility charge (we will not discuss the infallibility issue fully here). Yet Dawkins seems to insinuate that Darwinism is also infallible! Listen to him in The Blind Watchmaker:

“My argument will be that Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life.

“If I am right it means that, even if there were no actual evidence in favour of the Darwinian theory (there is, of course) we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.”[41]

Yes, you have read this correctly. If there were no evidence for Darwinism, Dawkins would still cling to it. Period. Case closed. End of story.

How would you go about reasoning with a person like that? Well, you can’t! If you want to try, more power to ya. But Dawkins would probably tell you to “fu$k off.”

CITATIONS

[1] Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization (London: Chatoo & Windus, 1946), 273.

[2] Karen Stollznow, “I’m Sick of Talking about Sexual Harassment!,” Scientific American, August 6, 2013.

[3] Robert Stacy McCain, “No Love for the Godless,” The American Spectator, August 9, 2013.

[4] Greta Christina, “Are We Having Sex Now or What?,” Susie Bright, ed., The Best of Best American Erotica (New York and London: Touchtone Book, 2008), chapter 11.

[5] For a decent study on this issue, see Sharon Lamb, The Trouble with Blame: Victims, Perpetrators, & Responsibility (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

[6] I understand that modern biologists are moving away from the metaphysical implications of the phraseology, but it seems to me that their move is an attempt to evade the political and sociological consequences of the philosophy, which was widely practiced at the dawn of the twentieth century.

[7] PZ Meyers, The Happy Atheist (New York: Random House, 2013), 51.

[8] Steven Pinker, “The Moral Instinct,” NY Times, January 13, 2008.

[9] Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on its History, Philosophy, and Religious Implications (New York: Routlege, 1989), 262, 269.

[10] Michael Shermer, The Science of God and Evil (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), 19.

[11] Quoted in Robert J. Richards, Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 40.

[12] Ibid., 41.

[13] Ibid.

[14] For a historical study on this, see for example Peter Dickens, Social Darwinism: Linking Evolutionary Thought to Social Theory (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000); Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Knopf, 1977); Ian Robert Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1997); Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002); Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (New York: Perseus Publishing, 2002).

[15] Arthur Keith, Evolution and Ethics (New York: Putnam, 1947), chapter 4.

[16] Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 62.

[17] William B. Provine, “Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy,” Origins Research 16 no. 1 (1994): 9; for other citations from people like E. O. Wilson who espouse similar views, see for example Harold W. Attridge and Keith Stewart Thomson, ed., The Religion of Science Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 46-47.

[18] Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain (New York: Times Books, 2012), 83.

[19] Michael Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge?: (New York: Ecco, 2011), see chapter four.

[20] Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 2-3.

[21] Dennett, Consciousness Explained.

[22] Harris, The Moral Landscape, 194.

[23] Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape (New York: Free Press, 2010), 217.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge?, 106.

[26] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 133.

[27] Huxley, Ends and Means, 270-271.

[28] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1954), 47.

[29] Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 34-35.

[30] See for example Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920 (New York: Penguin, 1994).

[31] Jerry Bowyer, “Perhaps Niall Ferguson Had a Point About Keynes,” Atlantic, May 12, 2013.

[32] Jerry Bowyer, “The Shaky Foundation of Keynesian Economics,” Forbes, June 9, 2011.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Huxley, Ends and Means, 272.

[35] Adam Kuper, Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 231.

[36] Cited in Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), chapter 9.

[37] Quoted in Tim Teeman, In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private Wrold of an American Master (New York: Magnus Books, 2013), 94.

[38] See Tim Teeman, In Bed with Gore Vidal (New York: Magnus Books, 2013).

[39] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York: Penguin, 2004), 688.

[40] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 52-53.

[41] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 287.

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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