I have one or two more quibbles with Matthew Reisz’s diatribe about atheism and science.

The notion that religion is perniciously simple-minded and locked in an eternal fight with science has been powerfully argued by a number of atheist thinkers, many of them based in the academy, with the charge led by Richard Dawkins in his 2006 best-seller The God Delusion. But what counts as evidence for such a claim?

It’s not really reasonable to give a simplistic version of a “notion” that you claim has been argued by “a number” of people, “many” of whom are academics, and then demand what is the evidence for your own simplistic version of a putative notion that belongs to no … Read the rest

The audio of the Humanisterna seminar in Stockholm has been posted. The first part is pretty cringe-worthy – I find that my way of playing for time is not a Caroline Kennedy level of “you know”s (though I do say it now and then), but the simpler expedient of repeating most of my words two or three times. That’s intelligent.

Well what the hell, you know? You have to figure out how the sentence is going to end and you need time to do that, so rather than just fall silent for a few seconds, obviously it’s much better to say this this this and then proceed. Right? Sure.

But I had just put in 19 hours of travel, after … Read the rest

So even the Times Higher thinks it has a duty to tell the world that there is no tension between science and religion, that they are perfectly harmonious and compatible, and that the only people who think otherwise are militant atheists. The Times Higher – which has some connection to higher education, and thus to intellectual development and the exercise of reason.

Matthew Reisz leans heavily on Karl Giberson for his “information” on this lack of tension. Giberson has co-written a book about six prominent atheist scientists: Dawkins, Gould, Sagan, Hawking, Weinberg, and Wilson. All of them have written something

 setting out their largely unflattering views on God and the godly.Given that they have thereby ventured well beyond their central