Of course, neither Giberson nor Miller nor anyone else has said that the new atheists have it in their power to make creationism disappear — this is yet another straw man — but leaving that aside, I would have Jerry note that Dawkins’s ability to convince people of “the reality and the power of evolution” was greatest when he wrote books that, with great clarity and verve, simply explained evolutionary theory and the core ideas behind it. When Dawkins took seriously the description of his own chair at Oxford — in “the public understanding of science” — he won a lot of people over. It wasn’t until he confused the public understanding of science with the public repudiation of religion that he began to alienate far more people than he convinced.

So the most important conflict--the one ignored by Giberson and Miller--is not between religion and science. It is between religion and secular reason. Secular reason includes science, but also embraces moral and political philosophy, mathematics, logic, history, journalism, and social science--every area that requires us to have good reasons for what we believe. Now I am not claiming that all faith is incompatible with science and secular reason--only those faiths whose claims about the nature of the universe flatly contradict scientific observations. Pantheism and some forms of Buddhism seem to pass the test. But the vast majority of the faithful--those 90 percent of Americans who believe in a personal God, most Muslims, Jews, and Hindus, and adherents to hundreds of other faiths--fall into the "incompatible" category.