Another example of why Atheists are loved by everyone.

Jerry Coyne complains that a New York Time article failed to kowtow to his brand of fundamentalism.

The NYT article says:

//when Jesus is thought to have been alive.//

And:

//Those involved in the project say it immediately brought to mind a biblical verse, Matthew 4:23://

And:

//On top of that, she said, there was sufficient “circumstantial evidence” to assume that Jesus may have set foot there. //

Coyne writes:

//Maybe I’m carping a bit here, but shouldn’t there have been a caveat to the effect that “historians are divided about whether Jesus really did the things that the Bible describes”? And really, how much confidence do we have that Capernaum was “a known center of Jesus’ activities”?  After all, how would it sit with Times readers if Manchester, New York was described as “the known place where the angel Moroni showed Joseph Smitgh the golden plates”?//

Is there any division among historians that Jesus existed or that he was involved in, you know, preaching and healing?  Not that I'm aware of.  Even Bart Erhman goes that far.

As for the Smith comparison, that would be spot on comparison if the article had said "Capernaum, where Jesus miraculously healed the sick" but it didn't.

What a moroni.

Update:  Paul Leffingwell - a Facebook friend on Unbelievable nails it with this comment:

 Coyne is mad that someone at the Ministry of Truth obviously wasn't doing their job and one-too-many credulous references to Jesus slipped into public print and the gullible proletariat might be unduly influenced.

Exactly.

Feser on the Cosmological Argument.

Philosopher Ed Feser analyzes the many responses to his post on the Cosmological Argument by pointing out that the smug, self-assured but totally ignorant combox atheists who think that they can dismiss the argument with a waive of the hand do not know what they are talking about.

Speaking of smug, self-assured but totally ignorant, check out this "argument" from a combox atheist Ben Goren:

First, recognize that any such thing must be understood only by analogy.

Bullshit. Though analogies are often a helpful pedagogical tool, everything proven real to date is best understood by direct examination and reasoning. Analogies inevitably break down.

Hah! Take that Rene Descartes!

For those who don't know the history and philosophy of science - such as those like Ben Goren who worship science but don't understand it - Rene Descartes proposed a method for approaching the natural world that involved modeling it through mathematics.

You know, Cartesian graphing and all that, which we all did - or should have done - when we were in 8th grade science.

But what is "graphing" and math other than a model?

And what is a model but an analogy?

After all, when we graph the distance of a falling object to time, we aren't drawing the actual falling object (in which case the picture would be an analogy), but we are analyzing certain isolated characteristics of the object extracted from the actual object.  And when we do a plot the distance that a lot of falling objects travel over time, and average those speeds, we aren't even analzying any particular real object.

In other words, we are analogizing from an object to a mathematical analysis and vice versa.

Insofar as modern science is based mathematical analysis, it is based using the method of analogies.