Could I strongly suggest everyone posting here actually read the book?

Tim Lukeman's has claimed here that literalism is the problem, or Chase Richards' that poor examples of religion are the problem, not religion itself.

Religion is what makes the religious, and what makes the literalists. Religion *is* the problem because of the problems it creates, even though not every religious person is a problem. Dennett makes a beautiful argument that even the apparently harmless religious are in fact harmful because they encourage and cover for the dangerous and/or deluding. Like America siding with Iran on the issue of abortion, the mainstream religious get nervous about persecuting the cults lest they break down their own rights, because honestly it is hard to draw a line between Dienetics and the "real" religions that would hold up in all the cases you'd like.

As for Josh's suggestion, that is excellent. Scientific revolutions have been made by religious people before. Dennett throughout the book asks the religious to join him on the quest for understanding --- he isn't interested in preaching to the choir, nor does he think scientists are necessarily objective.

Of course scientists have faith, e.g. in the review processes of their journals, but their faith can be overturned by evidence, and they know it's part of their job to tell others exactly what kinds of things would prove them wrong and how to do the tests. Following the Korean cloning scandel, all those review processes are being reexamined.

Dennett doesn't "rehash" Lawson and McCauley, though he does reference extensively and occasionally expand on them. He is a leading academic, not a pundit (as NYchick points out!)

Richard Ray et al --- Dennett apologizes in the preface for focusing on the 'booked religions', but says he just knows more about them (and so do his colleagues). I still think it will bean interesting read for you.

And a PS Paul Stone --- have a read of "The Selfish Gene" for a popular science version of one of many proposed explanations for how life came from basic chemicals. If you want to get back before where science has an edge, you can give a creator credit for the big bang. But then how is explaining the existence of a creator easier than explaining the existence of the big bang? (Credit where it's due: I first learned this argument from Carl Sagon)

FOX is so under Republican control, and the administration is so freaked out by what they saw at that church. Do you think its a coincidence that the next day the lead photo on Yahoo News was Condi Rice looking presidential & next to some BS blurb about her telling someone off about something? The story made it to Salon's AP wire too. & then a big push on how important surveillance is from the President all week...

Great article, really nicely written. But I'm wondering if you were serious when you said all candidates promise to double the number of engineers. Very cold war --- except no mention of scientists? Maybe they plan the doubling by forcing all the former scientists to do something more useful and less controversial than looking for evidence and facts.

Hi Michael --

Thanks for your answer. But it does sound like you are confounding science and engineering, though to be fair, clearly Bush is only interested in the latter.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that a lot of this anti-evolution rhetoric is about trying to undermine the methodology that is giving all the answers that the right doesn't like --- global warming, environmental degredation, political science showing that Fox watchers are more likely to believe misinformation than PBS watchers (e.g. about whether WMD were found in Iraq or Hussein had anything to do with Sept 11). This administration only likes people who follow the party line, and science doesn't let you do that. Science tends to converge on the truth.

Engineering on the other hand is mostly about building things. It's important too, but it's politically agnostic.

After world war II, science and engineering were held up together as having won the war, and even into the seventies we were told science was noble and engineering lucrative when I was in school. But now a scary number of people think the title "Prof." is less impressive than the title "Dr." This is partly because of the misinformation about all academics being liberal after they "voted for Gore". In fact, academics voted for Gore in the same proportion and the rest of the communities they lived in. The famous survey showing 70% voting for Gore (in contrast to 50% of the nation) only surveyed the top 10 universities in the country. What conservatives should worry about why those are all in liberal areas (except Duke, & maybe UCSD.)