Completely agree on all points, K. It's a common problem of naturalists wanting to say that they aren't doing metaphysics when they are. If you could get them to think about what they are saying long enough to realize that they aren't saying anything that wasn't debunked in Aristotle's day (their nominalism), then it would be different.
Actually, have you read Ed Feser's
The Last Superstition? It is, hands down, the best refutation I've read of the New Atheism. The book is polemic but that by his choice. That aside, it's a fabulous read, and what is unique is that it shows how the science v. religion question has been totally misunderstood from the outset, that the people who argue that they two are opposed are actually people with a particular philosophical worldview (naturalism). So science interpreted in a natuarlistic light is inherently opposed to religion, but that's not at all to say that science itself is. Then what is really great is that he goes on to show that not only is naturalism not the best interpretation of science, but that science itself strongly implies that it is a very poor interpretation. I say all that because were naturalists to understand those distinctions, the irony you rightly pointed out would become apparent even to them, I think. The whole thing just strikes me as incredible ignorance, and from that arrogance, on their part, more than anything else. But maybe I'm being too charitable.
As for Moreland, his mistake isn't at the beginning of life. It's at the end of it. He thinks that brain-death is a perfectly fine criteria for saying a person has died because he thinks the unity of the body is lost when that level of brain function ceases. I don't have my lecture notes in front of me, but I think I go through Moreland's view and why I and others find it problematic in the tenth lecture of "Issues in Ethics" (a course I teach at FGS) and then the next lecture goes into specific details regarding brain death specifically as it relates to organ donation. If you really want to put yourself to sleep looking for details about what I'm saying, the audio files are available here:
http://cmmorrison.wordpress.com/courses/
edit:
Yeah, my comments on my disagreements with with Moreland and Rae can be found at 35:00 of the tenth lecture of "Issue in Ethics," although if you want to listen to it, I'd recommend starting at 33:30, because those about two minutes deal with PVS patients, which provides an important context. If you have
Body and Soul nearby, by the way, you can go to page 337 and find their own position, which is what I and others are strongly objecting to. Put simply, they think that whole-brain death is consistent with the substance view, whereas we are saying that it is not. As I say at 38:55, "The brain is not the center of the person; it is an organ, like everything else." The comments as a whole are there only a few minutes. The brain death issue is taken up in much more detail in the entirety of the next lecture.