There are a few points that I think may be helpful in the recent debate over the atheist/God/religion/science/creation/evolution tangle.
I myself am a mild atheist (meaning atheist as opposed to antitheist), and no longer religious at all. So what follows is not an apologetic for religion, so much as an attempt at clarity.
Conservative Christians and the New Atheists have unwittingly conspired with each other in the false belief that science and religion are competing enterprises—that both are sources or pathways to "Truth". This leads, inevitably, to collisions. But the "truth" is that science and religion are not interested in the same areas, don't use comparative methods, and it makes little sense to pit them against each other.
Science is a method, developed to increase our understanding of the physical world, and how it works, in an extremely reliable way. It does this by being absolutely fanatical about certain extensions of common sense. If I have a theory that two balls of different weight will fall at the same rate, I have to prove it by dropping two balls of the same weight and seeing if it's true. And I have to do it in a way that you can repeat, to make sure I didn't cheat.
There's nothing particularly mystical or elite about the scientific method in principle. Everyone can understand the basic idea.
Religion is something altogether different. It's not generally interested in a deeper understanding of the physical world, or how it works, at all. Theologians don't claim to make discoveries about the speed of light, or the size of the electron, not even using religious techniques. They just aren't interested. The facts that pertain to theology are of two kinds: cultural and spiritual. That is, they are about the inner life of individuals, or about the larger issues of culture.
Science has some interest in these two areas, as well—but from a different point of view. When a scientist studies culture, he or she studies things like kin-groups, or ethno-semantic structures. That is, a scientist describes culture as an object. Religion, on the other hand, is not really interested in any culture but its own. It doesn't try to answer the question, "how do cultures develop or behave?" but the question, "how should my culture develop or behave?" On the spiritual side, science asks questions like "what causes depression, and how do you treat it?" while religion asks questions like, "what kinds of habits should I try to form?"
Both Conservative Christians and the New Atheists have refused to see this first distinction. They are in complete agreement that a scientific theory like evolution and a theological theory like creation are talking about the same domain, and that therefore they conflict, and so a battle must be fought. They both tend to ignore the fact that there are a great many Christians who see no conflict between the two, and that many of these same Christians are scientists.
It's easy enough to understand why the Conservative Christians make this mistake. They simply refuse to recognize, for reasons which will become clear later in this essay, that moderate and liberal Christians are true representatives of the faith. They believe themselves to be the true Christians, and since they (mistakenly) believe that religion is about the same domain as science, so must all real Christians.
It's harder to understand why the New Atheists allow themselves to be sucked into this error—not only refusing to believe that religion is not about the same subject matter as science, but refusing to notice that religions exist which are quite aware of this, some of them even atheistic. I agree with PZ Myers that it is foolish of scientists to treat pseudoscience as though it were a respectable alternative, but on Jake Young's side, it is also foolish to make assumptions about religion that aren't true, and then paint all religion with the same brush, perhaps alienating people who otherwise would be on their side.
This leads me to a second distinction which is often overlooked—a distinction in kinds of religion. It centers on the idea of "should" or "ought" that I previously mentioned as central to the religious domain. The Judeo-Christian tradition—the only one I really know anything about—contains two quite different approaches to the idea of "oughtness", from ancient times down to the present.
On one hand stands the wisdom tradition, which views the ought question through the lens of cause and effect—I ought to do that which is in my self-interest, and in the interest of others. On the other hand stands the law tradition, which views the same question through the lens of authority—I ought to do that which God has commanded.
In general, the more conservative the religion, the more authoritarian its worldview, and the more likely it is to hold a legal view of oughtness. This explains a lot. It explains why it's the conservative end of the religious spectrum that is always trying to force its views into law. It explains why it's the conservative end of the spectrum that is so unwilling to compromise.
It also explains why it's the conservative end of the spectrum which puts up such a battle about issues like evolution.
The authoritarian approach depends, for one thing, on there being a final authority—God. But traditionally one of the explanations for this authority is the idea that God owns everything, by virtue of having made it. Also, traditionally, the Bible must be completely trustworthy, or how are we to know what God's laws are? And the Bible describes the creation of the earth, not that long ago, in a six day period.
The creation story hasn't always been interpreted that way, of course, but here is another place where the Conservative Christians and the New Atheists are unwittingly holding hands. Conservative theology has bought into a scientific model of knowledge. Without realizing it, they have come to believe that the scientific domain is the only domain, and that to take language seriously one must read it the way one would read a science text. Consequently, they have a very literal reading of the creation story, which was never intended to be read that way.
The result of all this is that the legalism and scientism of Conservative Christianity turns creation and evolution into a battle-ground.
On the other end of the spectrum, moderate to liberal Christianity and many non or post-Christian traditions, there is a much greater interest in the wisdom tradition, which is, after all, the primary tradition of the New Testament. These are religious people who demand that religion be kept out of the public school system, who stand up for women's rights, who support separation of church and state, who donate to foundations that support science.
The real problem is not religion, but authoritarianism—and that would continue to be a problem, even if all the fundamentalists left the church tomorrow but kept their authoritarian worldview. Unfortunately that goes unnoticed, and unaddressed, in the midst of the battle.
There's an interesting theorem in military science, which states that the longer two forces battle each other, the more similar they become. We seem to be seeing something like this in the current culture wars. The most conservative Christians and the most liberal Atheists have come to share a worldview in which all religion is legalistic, all knowledge is physical, science and religion are competing roads to truth, and a battle is inevitable. Both sides have a stake in this picture—conscious or not. Both sides get book deals, prestige, and speaking engagements out of it—intentionally or not.
It's kind of like Bush and Bin Laden.
