This Town Ain’t Big Enough

Today we offer a heaping helping of heresy, cooked up by some of our hardest-hitting, highest-profile heathens. First, as a little amuse-bouche, we have a recent editorial by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, in which the author argues that, despite conciliatory efforts to get “militant” atheists to stop being such party-poopers, the fact is that religion and science are not just, as Stephen Jay Gould famously called them, “non-overlapping magisteria” — but really do represent fundamentally incompatible ways of understanding the world.

Next, the main course: an extended e-mail exchange between the adamantly hell-bound infidel Sam Harris (a founder, most recently, of the Reason Project), and the science writer (and former editor of the journal Nature) Philip Ball. It is not brief, but it is worth your time, I think: it limns with useful clarity the range of viewpoints to be found within the growing community of unbelievers, an aspect of this debate that is often overlooked. Read it here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Religion, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.