David Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, has just published a comprehensive survey of the debate between critics of religion and its apologists. On the one hand, we have “[t]he four horsemen of the current antireligious apocalypse… Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Carl Sagan”. On the other, Barash spotlights those who would seek to reconcile the irreconcilable. Francis Collins, the geneticist and head of the Human Genome Project, comes in for some probing questions:
What, then, is his basis for accepting some Bible stories and not others? If Collins is simply clinging to those tenets that cannot be disproved, while disavowing those that can, then isn’t he indulging in another incarnation of the “god of the gaps” that he very reasonably claims to oppose? What about, say, those loaves and fishes, or the Book of Revelation? And does the director of the Human Genome Project maintain that Jesus of Nazareth was literally born of a virgin and inseminated by the Holy Ghost? If so, then was he haploid or diploid? Is it necessarily churlish to ask what it is, precisely, that a believer (layperson or scientist) believes? In the devil, angels, eternal hellfire, damnation, archangels, incubi and succubi, walking on water, raising Lazarus?
Well worth reading in full.