Shamefully, furtively, guiltily stolen in full from YARGB:
The New York Review of Books: A Mission to Convert: "The reason Dawkins thinks he has something to say about God is, of course, clear: he is an evolutionary biologist. And as we all know, Darwinism had an early and noisy run-in with religion. What Dawkins never seems to consider is that this incident might have been, in an important way, local and contingent. It might, in other words, have turned out differently, at least in principle. Believers could, for instance, have uttered a collective 'So what?' to evolution. Indeed some did. The angry reaction of many religious leaders to Darwinism had complex causes, involving equal parts ignorance, fear, politics, and the sheer shock of the new. The point is that it's far from certain that there is an ineluctable conflict between the acceptance of evolutionary mechanism and the belief that, as William James put it, 'the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe.' Instead, we and Dawkins might simply be living through the reverberations of an interesting, but not especially fundamental, bit of Victorian history. If so, evolutionary biology would enjoy no particularly exalted pulpit from which to preach about religion.
There is no conflict, and the whole Dawkins thing is silly. From what I've heard, scientists are just as religious, or non-religious, as the rest of the population. Science and religion exist in entirely different spheres of experience.
