I will be responding in some detail to this post by Jerry Coyne, which is itself a response to my recent arguments on the subject of science and religion (a major topic, and developed in considerably more detail, in Unscientific America). But for now I just want to clear one point out of the way, concerning my previous writings on this subject. At the intro to his post, Coyne notes that way back when I had a Slate article--a review of the 2001 PBS series Evolution--which pretty much argued that it's bogus to pretend that evolution is not corrosive to religious belief. The piece (as I read it today) really only had one paragraph that substantively makes this argument, but here it is:
Evolution’s attempt to divorce Darwinian science from atheism, though well intentioned, is finally naive. Darwinism presents an explanation for life’s origins that lacks any supernatural element and ...
