P. Z. Myers has angered millions with his tirades against religion posted on his popular science blog, Pharyngula. But as Jessica Marshall finds out, the scourge of creationists turns out to be a mild-mannered man from Minnesota
PAUL ZACHARY MYERS drinks his daily coffee at the Common Cup, whose mission is posted in a handwritten sign above its stone fireplace: “The purpose of Common Cup is to provide a Christian environment and a welcoming place for the local and campus communities to come together.”
“I write some of my most subversive screeds against religion sitting there,” Myers says.
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The coffee house is in Morris, Minnesota, roughly halfway between Minneapolis and Fargo, North Dakota. Surrounded by soybean fields and grain silos, the politically conservative town of 5000 is served by at least 14 churches. It is from this God-fearing outpost that Myers, who trained as a biologist, writes Pharyngula, one of the most widely read science blogs on the web – and a pointedly unchristian one at that.
In Pharyngula, Myers campaigns for evolutionary science, takes aim at creationists and proselytises for atheism while ridiculing religious beliefs with a sharp virtual tongue. In , for example, he wrote, “There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid… And nothing makes them stupider than religion.”
In person Myers says, “Religion in this country is protected by a wall of silence. You cannot argue with religion. As an atheist I try to teach people that you don’t have to respect religious differences or ideas. This is something that I would like to get across to people: disrespecting ideas is a good thing.”
Myers practices what he preaches. In perhaps his most notorious stunt, he pierced a Catholic Eucharist wafer with a rusty nail and threw it in the trash, along with some coffee grounds, a banana peel, a few pages each of the Koran and Richard Dawkins’s atheist manifesto, The God Delusion, just to show he had no reverence for his own doctrine, either. Myers commenced “The Great Desecration”, as he called it, in support of a college student at the University of Central Florida who “stole” a consecrated communion wafer, which devout Catholics believe is the actual body of Christ, from a mass. For this, the student was met with threats and his actions were compared by some to kidnapping.
“He pierced a Catholic Eucharist wafer with a rusty nail and threw it in the trash”
Myers view is that a consecrated wafer is “just a cracker”. His Great Desecration inspired more than 2300 blog comments in 20 hours and 15,000 hate messages. Myers was surprised by the reaction but shrugs off such criticism. “There have been a few cases when people have sent me very explicit descriptions of what they’re going to do to me. That’s a little ‘ick’. But for the most part, these are people blustering on the internet. It’s hard to take them too seriously.”
Myers’s inflammatory acts and language would lead one to suspect him of being overtly aggressive, yet in person he is soft spoken and his views seem rather measured. While he affirms the right of atheists not to respect religious differences, he adds, “We don’t want that to lead to the point where you can say, ‘You don’t have to respect people being different at all.’ That isn’t true. I think diversity is a great thing. Disrespect for ideas, great. Disrespect for people, not so great.”
Myers grew up in the 1960s, when coverage of the space programme was a regular part of the evening news. But in his adolescence he decided that biology was more interesting and discarded his model rockets in favour of dissecting road kill near his home in Kent, a distant suburb of Seattle. He was a part of the Scandinavian Lutheran community there: “Church was a matter of going to Sunday school and having a good time with your friends. Our Sunday school teacher was this nice, wonderful woman who I really liked, and we memorised Bible verses.” But when it was time for confirmation class and the teacher laid out the core beliefs of the church, young Myers balked. The Bible verses he had memorised in Sunday school rang hollow compared to what he’d learned from the road kill. “That’s real. You can get out there and look at these things and you can start seeing the relationship between the dead porcupine and the dead otter you found,” he recalls, “The biology books go into specifics. They talk about physical reality – stuff you can go out and test yourself. That’s a big difference from what you do in church.”
Today Myers lives in a peeling white house across the street from the University of Minnesota Morris. His living room appears to do triple duty as lounge, office and exercise studio. His readers send him Darwin figures, fossils and hand-knitted cephalopods, which clutter a side table. A beach-ball-sized, pink stuffed octopus occupies one seat of a couch. Cephalopods – squid and octopuses – are a pet interest, and he posts a picture of one every Friday on his blog. Pharyngula (tag line: “Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal”) grew out of a class he taught in the early days of the blogosphere. He began using the course software to blog after the semester was over. “People liked it,” he says. “The blog just turned into this huge trumpet.”
He acknowledges that there is a difference between blogs and news writing. “I care about the facts, of course. At the same time, one of the things you do with a blog is you throw out ideas.” Unlike writing for magazines with fact-checkers and libel lawyers, he says, “I don’t have that throttle.” Myers readily admits that being provocative is part of the game. “There are no constraints on me,” he says. “I can be uncompromising in my criticisms. I think my philosophy of blogging fits with what people want to see in a blog. They want to see an open discussion. They want to see ideas presented strongly and they want to see them thoroughly wrestled.”
It’s not just believers who have felt the wrath of Myers’s unthrottled keyboard. He expels plenty of words attacking the science media, including this magazine. In 2008 he came down hard on a New Scientist cover that proclaimed “Darwin Was Wrong” for giving ammunition to creationists. “As a blogger, I just said that controversy sells,” he says (indeed, that issue was the year’s best-seller), “but that was bad controversy. We’re already getting accounts from the front line of people who walk into the board of education with that article. They come in waving that cover and say, ‘This is why we’ve got to teach creationism.’ ” He concedes that the accompanying story was accurate and that the editorial was “solid stuff”, but adds that “The front cover failed. It gave entirely the wrong message.”
Nonetheless, Myers acknowledges that he would be “the wrong person to be in charge of science journalism. I respect the fact that journalism has long had a set of standards and practices that are valuable. But at this point, the discipline has become very, very sloppy. A lot of science journalists don’t know much science. Many are picked because they are willing to do this fairly low prestige job. You sometimes see these so-called science journalists who write like they were formerly sports journalists.”
But for all of his cantankerousness, Myers says the spirit is debate, not malice: “There is this tradition in science that you can argue forcefully for a position and it doesn’t mean that you are going to punch the guy in the nose. Science is a deeper part of my persona than religion or atheism or anything.”
Profile
P. Z. Myers is an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris. His blog, Pharyngula (), receives about 2.5 million hits every month
