In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.

There is no horror, no amount of evil in the world, that a true believer can't rationalize as consistent with a loving God. It's the ultimate way of fooling yourself.

Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible though very unlikely that our whole world is controlled by elves. But supernatural explanations like these are simply never needed; we manage to understand the natural world just fine using reason and materialism.

The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn't exist.

Why, exactly, are scientists supposed to accord "respect" to a bunch of ancient fables that are not only ludicrous on their face, but motivate so much opposition to science?

In the end theologians are jealous of science, for they are aware that it has greater authority than do their own ways of finding "truth": dogma, authority, and revelation. Science does find truth, faith does not.

Science has only two things to contribute to religion: an analysis of the evolutionary, cultural, and psychological basis for believing things that aren't true, and a scientific disproof of some of faith's claims (e.g., Adam and Eve, the Great Flood). Religion has nothing to contribute to science, and science is best off staying as far away from faith as possible. The "constructive dialogue" between science and faith is, in reality, a destructive monologue, with science making all the good points, tearing down religion in the process.