Salman Rushdie in the Toronto Star:
“Not believing in God is no excuse for being virulently anti-religious or naïvely pro-science,” says Dylan Evans, a professor of robotics at the University of West England in Bristol.
Evans has written an article for the Guardian of London deriding the old-fashioned, “19th-century” atheism of such prominent thinkers as Richard Dawkins and Jonathan Miller, instead proposing a new, modern atheism which “values religion, treats science as simply a means to an end and finds the meaning of life in art.”
Indeed, he says, religion itself is to be understood as “a kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality and which only a child would reject for being false.”
Evans’ position fits well with that of the American philosopher of science Michael Ruse, whose new book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle, lays much of the blame for the growth of creationism in America — and for the increasingly strident attempts by the religious right to have evolutionary theory kicked off the curriculum and replaced by the new dogma of “intelligent design” — at the door of the scientists who have tried to compete with, and even supplant, religion.
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