Dr. P.Z. Myer did, in fact, make my talk Thursday night and something very strange happened: He, too, experienced a sudden and dramatic change in his level of courage during the course of the speech.
During the question and answer session, Professor Myer simply leaned against a door post with his arms crossed and said nothing. He just stared at me blankly and stood motionless in the same place where he was standing for the last twenty minutes of the speech. During the “Q & A”, I looked directly at him and asked “Are there any other questions?”
There was nothing but silence from Dr. Myer. But here’s how he described the scene on his website:
“…a fellow with a darker complexion and a long ponytail raised his hand to ask a good question, one that was actually very close to what I was going to ask as I was working my way up towards the room. He pointed out the fundamental inconsistency in Adams' conversion story—it didn't make sense that a good liberal would, in anger at feminism, abandon all liberal principles to so whole-heartedly embrace all of the completely contrary principles of conservative extremism (his answer: it was complicated, and there was more to the story than he'd been able to tell—I bet). The questions were just starting to warm up and drill down into Adams' hypocrisy, when one of our local ringleaders, who had jumped up out of his seat when Mr. Radical Ponytail had raised his hand, abruptly cut off the questions.”
The problem for Professor Myer is that – perhaps unbeknownst to him – the speech was videotaped. The videotape – taken by the school newspaper – will clearly show two things:
- The man who asked the question about my conversion was white.
- After I answered the white man’s question, the darker man in the ponytail asked a question about civil liberties, which I answered. He was not prevented from asking a question by a “local ringleader.”
More important than what the video will show is what it will not show. Specifically, there will be no image of Dr. Myer mustering the courage to ask a question of Dr. Adams. Instead, he simply cowered away, and then ran back to his home computer in order to blog a fictitious account of a wonderful event – probably while sitting in his pajamas.
But it is a shame that Dr. Myer lacked the courage to ask me a single question. I certainly had a couple to ask of him. And I’ll bet the audience would have liked to hear him explain how an evolutionist who deems the universe to be accidental can be so full of moral superiority. Or perhaps how the accidental moralist can be an atheist and yet so angry at God.
It takes courage for a man to admit that he is sometimes afraid. But that courage is not a gift of random mutation. It is a gift from a God who loves even the most hardened atheist. |