I'm flattered that John Rennie puts me in the same paragraph with Richard Dawkins (and Andrew Brown has me going toe-to-toe with a dead mystery writer—I'm battling the godly everywhere), but while I agree in part with what he's saying, there's also a theme that I have often found troubling and self-destructive.

Just to further clarify, I'm absolutely not arguing for a strategic moratorium on anti-religious arguments. Some critics have suggested that outspokenly atheistic evolution advocates such as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers should censor themselves for the greater good. I disagree: the scientific community encompasses many points of view and there is no reason to hide that fact. At the same time, let's not play into the hands of the creationists by unintentionally sending the message that science is automatically derisive of religion.

It is entirely correct that the scientific community is full of Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and agnostics and atheists, and I think that's reasonable and fair—we're even pleased to point out to the creationists that many of our leading lights have been and are religious (Dobzhansky, Ayala, Miller, Collins: it isn't at all difficult to find people who can do both good science and follow a religion in their private life). It is self-evident that scientists are not necessarily derisive of religion, and also that science as an abstract concept can't be derisive at all. However, I do think that the processes of science are antithetical to the processes of religion—personal revelation and dogma are not accepted forms of evidence in the sciences—and that people can encompass both clashing ideas is nothing but a testimony to the flexibility of the human mind, which has no problem partitioning and embracing many contradictions. There are also many scientists who are capable of suspending disbelief and reading fantasy novels with pleasure; that doesn't mean that magic is a valid way of manipulating the world.

I really think we (not me, of course, but the general "we" of all of us ladies and gentlemen fighting creationism) go too far in trying to present science as compatible and even friendly to religion. It's not. The whole philosophy of critical thinking and demanding reproducible evidence arms its proponents with a wicked sharp knife that is all too easily applied to religious beliefs, which rely entirely on credulity. While individuals may be happy to sheathe that knife during the church service, filling the pews with ranks of critical individuals while preaching absurdities is a risky business. Why do you think I can't go to church? It's because I'm sitting there with a demanding and hair-trigger critical faculty, thinking "baloney!" at almost every platitude from the preacher, struggling against the urge to stand up and shout "Show me the evidence!" at the pulpit. Even if I keep that urge in control, it's not a comfortable time. The religious know that a well-educated populace with a good background in science would mean church attendance would fade away, especially for the more stridently evangelical/fundamentalist (AKA "insane") sects.

We are being disingenuous when we claim science is compatible with religion. It's compatible with a kind of thoughtful religion that consciously sets itself aside as dealing solely with a metaphysical domain, not the world; it encourages the apostasy of deism and agnosticism, and can easily lead people into the path of atheism. It's far more compatible with freethought than the kinds of religions our opponents, the creationists, hold. It does not mollify that family of Southern Baptists to explain that a college education is likely to allow their kids to emerge still Christian, but critical of fundamentalism, and more impressed with the testimony of rocks than the list of begats in Genesis.

So what we get is a common strain of chronic avoidance of the issue among the pro-evolution crowd. We put up a façade that ignores two important things: 1) the majority of scientists are deists, agnostics, and atheists, who want to promote greater science literacy and rational thinking (but not, explicitly, freethought—that's only a common aftereffect) and 2) the creationists aren't stupid about social issues, and can see right through it—and they are well aware that compromise erodes religion, not vice versa. It's analogous to the way the Intelligent Design creationists pretend to be scientists with no religious motivations^*, which is similarly false and transparent.

I do not think that we should marginalize the opinions of scientists who are also religious—far from it, I think it is a good idea to have them there to show that you can do good science while holding some unscientific ideas. However, I also think we ought to do a better job of similarly promoting atheist scientists, not instead of but as a complement to those more socially acceptable theists. Science should be seen as a muscular endeavor, and hiding our fiercest and most fearless advocates behind the scenes is a waste of potential and gives the impression that we're timid and ashamed of many of our best and brightest.

Case in point: Richard Dawkins. How often have you heard the phrase, "I love Dawkins' books, but…" followed by excuses that he's too arrogant, he's too hard on the religious, he's a militant atheist? Here in the US at least, you'll often see Ken Miller the Catholic biologist trotted out as the man to emulate, the unintimidating figure of a scientist with something in common with the ordinary guy on the street (unfairly, too, I think—he ought to be praised as a biologist, a lucid writer, a great speaker, not because of his one failing: he's religious), but you'll never see Dawkins brought up in the same way. He's "far too fierce", as if that were a shortcoming.

It's a strength. Creationists hate the guy because he doesn't just stand against one ludicrous symptom of their belief system, he goes straight to the root with scathing rhetoric against the whole monumental pile of rickety confabulations. Look at how they react to him:

The Christian Courier

Professor Dawkins is not just an atheist. He is a swaggering atheist. He hates religion with a passion and never misses an opportunity to level a blast at those who profess devotion to the Supreme Being.

Albert Mohler

As a militant atheist, Dawkins is living out the inevitable consequences of the Darwinian worldview. The evolutionary perspective is left with the universe as nothing more than a silent box empty of all meaning, intention, and design. Everything within the box must be explained in terms of purely naturalistic materials and processes. The cosmos and everything within it is nothing more than a marvelous--if often malevolent--accident of nature.

Robert Fulford

He won't mute his views of religion to avoid hurting the feelings of believers, as some scientists do. He lost any respect he had for that practice in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, "when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonation and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place."

Gregg Easterbrook

Don't take this personally, but if you are an American adult there is a one in two chance that Richard Dawkins, a renowned professor of science at Oxford, thinks you are "ignorant, stupid or insane," unless you are "wicked." These are the adjectives Dawkins chooses to describe the roughly 100 million Americans adults who, if public opinion polls are right, believe Homo sapiens was created directly by God, rather than gradually by evolution. Ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked. Not much to choose from there!

Michael Novak

…Dawkins in his apoplexy can find no place for believing Jews and Christians except delusion. He thinks of atheism as a place of honor and of religion as a disease; teaching of the latter, a crime; teaching of the former, a way of light, knowledge, and truth.

Christian Courier

Richard Dawkins is a professor of zoology at Oxford University. He describes himself as "a fairly militant atheist, with a fair degree of active hostility toward religion". According to Dawkins, "religion is very largely an enemy of truth". He characterizes the idea that man was created by God as "blasphemy," and insists that "we [atheists] have to fight against" this ideology.

The fact is – it is he, along with those of his anti-intellectual ilk, who are the real enemies of truth, and the adversaries of common sense.

Now, really, how can you but admire someone who gets such press from such execrable sources?

When creationists carp at the uncompromising atheism of people like Dawkins, let's not pander to them and thereby validate their complaints by offering up some more palatable Christian proxy, but instead stand up for them. Yes, he's a forthright atheist…and so was John Maynard Smith and Ernst Mayr and Francis Crick and many, many others. We like them. Have you got a problem with that?

Some people already have the right idea. Jerry Coyne reviewed A Devil's Chaplain : Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love ^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, and thought that ferocious atheism was admirable.

"Modern theists," writes Dawkins, "might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." But Dawkins goes beyond a mere defence of atheism. He also subscribes to the American writer H. L. Mencken's dictum that: "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." Why, asks Dawkins, should the public give religious arguments any more credibility than arguments for other brands of nonscientific 'truth'? Curiously, Dawkins does not explore why religious ideas get undue respect. Surely one reason is that arguing about religion (especially when one participant is an atheist) is unproductive, likely to produce only mutual dislike. No rapprochement is possible between those whose beliefs derive from evidence and those whose beliefs either do not depend on evidence or are unshaken by contrary evidence. This is why science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world.

Dawkins' critique of religion rests on three points. First, because different faiths make very different claims about the world, they cannot all be true; and none of the claims (such as the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven) can be scientifically verified. Second, the choice among faiths is not based on rational consideration: the vast majority of people simply practice the religion of their parents. This is especially galling to Dawkins, who sees the easy indoctrination of children as a product of natural selection favouring the rapid spread of information between generations. Finally, Dawkins considers religions to be vehicles of evil because they facilitate the labelling of people as either 'us' or 'them', fostering xenophobia and its attendant horrors — Northern Ireland and the Middle East come to mind.

These views are summarized in a wonderfully passionate essay, "Time To Stand Up", written shortly after 11 September, 2001. One excerpt: "To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real-world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons, and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic."

Lest you think it's just because he's a fellow evolutionary biologist (we're almost all godless heathens, you know), Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh reviewed the same book, and had this to say.

So the real object of Dawkins's grand Darwinian wrath is not the small person, who comforts herself against the cold winds of reality with the threadbare blanket of religion and the placebos of phony medicine, it is the powerful institutions that exploit her understandable human frailty and give her the stones of illusion instead of the bread of truth.

We have to define Dawkins, therefore, as a moral crusader, a prophet of science as a better way of understanding ourselves than the delusions of religion, whether orthodox or new age. And it is a tragic vision he offers us. The goal of life is life itself. There is no final purpose, no end other than entropy and the end of all endings. But there is deep refreshment to be had "from standing up full-face into the keen wind of understanding". As a recovering Christian, I want to say amen to that…

That's a lovely way to put it, and I agree entirely with it. Unfortunately, people are petty about some things, and when they see someone else throw away their blankie and stride out to face reality, they take it as a personal rebuke, and every suggestion to others that they come out into the light is regarded as an insult to their hidey-hole, their much beloved little binkie. That's too bad, but I don't think the right answer is to reassure everyone that it's OK to huddle away, or that their threadbare blanket is a splendid and precious thing. We shouldn't snatch it away, but sorry, everyone, let's be honest: it's a crutch, a waste of time, a shroud that prevents you from seeing a real and terrible beauty. The real heroes of science are the ones who shed old superstitions and confront a harsh and callous universe without comforting, misleading fables.

Time to stand up.

^*I have to make an incredibly charitable concession. I think one of the reasons the creationists push the ID strategy is that they recognize that religious ideas about our origins are currently mired in a ghetto of ignorance—that most creationists believe because they are slaves to dogma. ID is an attempt to provide an intellectually respectable framework within which god-belief can flourish without doing the equivalent of a lobotomy on its proponents, and at least that goal is admirable. It fails because they face the intractable problem of inventing evidence out of a vacuum, and because its leaders aren't very bright. They are cruising along on the brute-force propellant of ideology rather than science, against the thrust of the evidence.

Coyne JA (2003) Gould and God. Nature 422:813-814.