My contribution to the Priests in Lab Coats debate going on at Salon.com:
Science, including evolution, says nothing about theism in general. Given the wide variety of gods that people have believed in, this should not be surprising – it’s not clear that ANYTHING speaks to theism in general.
However it is true that science – evolution, of course, but also geology, physics, and biology – is incompatible with certain religious viewpoints, particularly those that hold inerrantist positions concerning various ancient texts. Science explores regular relationships between phenomena – gravitational (stuff falls), chemical, kinetic, and so forth. If such relationships are merely the whimsy of a capricious deity – if water can be conjured into existence to create a flood and then made to vanish – then such regularities are impossible. Evidence becomes meaningless: we may as well believe in solipsism or Last-Thursdayism (the reductio ad absurdum that the universe was created last Thursday, complete with people with memories of a longer existence).
Scientists MUST disbelieve in a world that is phenomenally capricious. If a theist believes in such a world, they cannot accept science. There is no coherent worldview that is consistent with both. But this is not an argument about theism, merely about a particular fundamentalist worldview.