The Precarious but Profound Middle Ground In The Struggle Between Religion and Science

I recently criticized Jerry Coyne, standing in for the New Atheists, for having a simplistic view of religious people as people unable to abandon obsolete ideas and move into the modern world. The purpose of my piece was to defend religion -- particularly Christianity -- against such charges: "To insist that the authentically religious are defined by their inability to move out of the past is to create a straw man," was how I put it. In the writings of so many of the New Atheists, religious believers are reduced to a regiment of caricatured clones, marching in lock-step behind a pied piper from some previous century.

I acknowledged, of course, that there are indeed Christians who hold to ideas from the past, such as the long-disproved notion that the earth is just a few thousand years old. Many of them, in fact, do so with no understanding of why, oblivious to the progress of science on this or any other matter. Scientific illiteracy is no respecter of persons, though, as Chris Mooney has argued eloquently in Unscientific America, and even non-religious people have their own scientific disconnects.

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