For some reason, Jerry Coyne insists on reading and commenting on things he finds stupid in theology, when in general he hasn’t exactly demonstrated that he actually understands what he’s criticizing (see examples here, here, and here for just a few of them).
His latest target is the book Questions of Truth: Fifty-one Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief), by John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale. So, if you’ve read through the examples above, remember one thing:
For any book or essay on “sophisticated theology” that Coyne lambastes, always read it yourself to see if it says anything like Coyne thinks it does.
The Verbose Stoic 
June 16, 2012 at 5:12 pm |
Quite! In this case his attempted pot-shots failed lamentably, mainly because he would take something we wrote in response to Question X and pretend it was in response to a completely different question Y.
June 17, 2012 at 5:25 am |
I’ve found that Jerry Coyne tends to misrepresent in an interesting way. When P.Z. Myers (for example) misrepresents, it’s pretty clear that he didn’t actually read the work, and so is just grabbing things out of it to mock. I really do believe that Coyne does read the works and likely thinks he’s representing it fairly, but his problem is that he reads the works in HIS mindset as opposed to that of the authors, and so in that light he ends up accusing them of things that they never actually said because it’s what follows if one believes as Coyne does as opposed to what the authors believe.
All of the examples in my quote are exactly that sort of thing.
November 9, 2012 at 1:15 pm |
[…] with John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale, since Coyne criticized them and that was one post that I commented on with more of a “he gets it wrong so often that you should really read it yourse…, but I had never read it myself. Now I will, once it comes in. I’ll also read “The […]
November 14, 2012 at 6:50 am |
[…] about addressing them after I read the reader. The first one I’ll address is the one I linked here, where he called out what he’s saying is a stupid theology quote of the […]