"We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy's line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects -- with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian." -- C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics
The American Scientific Affiliation
This issue is as old as dirt, and is certainly no frontier in the science and religion dialogue. You'd be better off reading, e.g., the journal Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. But, I've kept these links up, since Dawkins is, at least currently, a popular face in the media. To any atheists who might read this, I realize Dawkins represents a particular strain of thought and is not representative (any more than Jerry Falwell is representative of my own faith). That said, he is emblematic of the myths that (1) scientific progress is the answer to the world's problems and (2) faith in the scientific method as the only avenue to truth is obviously more valid than faith in a loving God.
A prominent evolutionary biologist and athiest, Richard Dawkins, recently published a book, The God Delusion, arguing that the world is better off without religion. Though he claims to represent science, he comes off as nearly as fundamentalist as those he wishes to dispute. Here are a few responses. The first is from the liberal but estimable Harpers magazine. In all fairness, Dawkins is a straw man (as Haught points out in the third link), but it's nonetheless instructive to see the straw fly.
There is also an instructive set of back-to-back interviews on the
NPR show Fresh Air by Dawkins
and Francis
Collins, a professed Christian and former head of the Human Genome
Project.