The Devil's Delusion

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

If nothing else, the attack on traditional religious thought marks the consolidation in our time of science as the single system of belief in which rational men and women might place their faith, and if not their faith, then certainly their devotion. From cosmology to biology, its narratives have become the narratives. They are, these narratives, i

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,” the geneticist Richard Lewontin remarked equably in The New York Review of Books, “in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories

What astronomical observations may, in fact, have demonstrated is that the earth is no more numerous than a single grain of sand on a vast beach. Significance is, of course, otherwise. Nonetheless, the inference is plain: What holds for the earth holds as well for human beings. They hardly count, and scientists like Stenger are not disposed to coun

This would not be the first time that an ideological system in conflict with the facts has found it prudent to defer to itself. And with predictably incoherent results.

the book that follows is in some sense a defense of religious thought and sentiment. Biblical verses are the least of it. A defense is needed because none has been forthcoming. The discussion has been ceded to men who regard religious belief with frivolous contempt. Their books have in recent years poured from every press, and although differing wi

While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought. The yearnings of the human soul are not in vain. There is a system of belief adequate to the complexity of experience. There is recompense for suffering.

We know better than we did what we do not know and have not grasped. We do not know how the universe began. We do not know why it is there. Charles Darwin talked speculatively of life emerging from a “warm little pond.” The pond is gone. We have little idea how life emerged, and cannot with assurance say that it did. We cannot reconcile our underst

Science as an institution is unified by the lowest common denominator of belief, and that is the conviction that science is a very good thing.