Tuesday, August 22, 2006

I Am Now A Radical Atheist!

At least according to the Creation Research [sic] Society, in their recent issue of Creation Matters. Unfortunately, the article is really about PZ Myers, attention hog that he is. The Panda's Thumb, the webblog I contribute to, only received a secondary damnation:

Nature Gives Top Blog Honors to Radical Atheists

P . Z. Myers (U of Minnesota) has been one of the most foul-mouthed critics of creation, intelligent design and religion in general. [...]

Yet this man's blog, Pharyngula, was given top honors by Nature in its list of the the five top science blogs on the Internet (Anonymous, 2006). Second with the silver medal was Panda's Thumb, another strongly anti-ID blog to which Myers also contributes.

As PZ points out in comments, the title says "atheists", plural. Yet the only people referred to are himself and those of us who contribute to the 'Thumb. Needless to say, we're not all atheists. (And one wonders what you have to do to be a "radical" atheist when right-wing Christians consider any form of atheism akin to baby-stomping.)

As for myself, I'm a wishy-washy agnostic and am happy that way. There are other PT contributors who are Christians. PZ himself is an atheist, maybe even a radical atheist. But we sure as hell aren't all on the same page as far as religious belief goes. That's the great thing about science. You can be from different religions, nationalities, political ideologies, or even use different kinds of barbecue sauce, yet science remains the same. Evidence is evidence. You either think it matters or you don't.

But what's really stupid about the creationist article is that Nature didn't pick our blogs because they thought they were awesome (which they are), they picked them because they get the most traffic among science blogs. I'm pretty damed proud to be a contributor to the second most popular science blog on the internets, but unfortunately Nature isn't endorsing us. They're just reporting on who's getting the most traffic. My endorsement from Nature will therefore have to wait until I publish that killer research I'm working on.