Otherwise, one field risks becoming subordinate to the other; although it's likely that Coyne's theology is extraordinarily sophisticated, the brief excerpt of it that Bill Maher uses leads the viewer to suspect that if these precepts are followed to their logical conclusion, religion will always give way to science as John Paul II gave way to the certainty that organisms evolve over time.
If so, then efforts to restore faith to a more equal footing are naturally vulnerable to claims that they are reactionary attempts to usurp science's rightful and supreme interpretative role in modern life. It is easy to understand Richard Dawkins' profound revulsion over what he sees as resurgent religiosities surrounding Islamic fundamentalism on the one hand and Christian fundamentalisms on the other: These faith-oriented responses to world events pose an implicit challenge to his own conviction that all aspects of experience are the product of physical entities and so can be explained by scientific means, while their militant expression poses a more explicit threat to his freedom of thought. And given the process of secularization, these militant responses seem to him to be both dangerous and perverse in their recalcitrance.
It is easy to understand Dawkins' position, and likely this is why he appears to be so well received by the TED audience. However, it is hard to understand his own refusal to engage with religious thought as anything but a caricature of faith at its worst. The opening chapter of The God Delusion is punctuated with quite expressive paeans to the aesthetic appeal of a pantheistic science, the "transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries." But when he argues that this is not religion in itself, he falls strangely flat, offering only the rejoinder that if God is energy, then God is [in] coal. For Dawkins, this is obviously meant to be risible, but similar formulations have illuminated the work of mystics (not to mention poets) throughout human history, and in any event religion endures.
Dawkins' real dispute with communities of faith is over the personality that this pantheistic "big God" of Sagan and Einstein exhibits. The sentiments...
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