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Scientific American's Bad Religion
27 June 2007Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins takes the hard sell approach to promoting science to skeptics (that is, the faithful): Religion is bad science, he says, just plain wrong and rather stupid. Physicist Lewis Krauss goes for the soft sell: "Teaching is seduction," he purrs, with believers in mind. But lost in Scientific American's lengthy conversation between the two are the soft sciences that study religion. Krauss and Dawkins speak of "religion" as if the nature of the beast were a settled affair; but their colleagues in anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and other disciplines know that Religion with a capital R, an entity prone to the admonitions of Science with a capital S, is a mythical creature. Which makes the Krauss/Dawkins debate an excercise in bad faith.
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