In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.

People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.

Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more.

So, of course, Gish's presentation was well received, which it would have been the case had he only gotten up and said "praise the Lord" and sat back down.

Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.

Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things.