What a great world it would we if just one or indeed all of the Gods man has followed could be proved to be true.
How good if our personal God was the one.
How much better however if we could understand we have no need of a fantasy fairy storey.
And that fighting and killing in the name of a God is insane.
My fall from Christianity came after it was made clear the collection tray had more meaning than I, that hunger would e rewarded in heaven if I gave till it hurt, no thanks.

What always makes me laugh is the argument by religiously inclined folk that "If you don't believe in God, then there's no absolute right or wrong so you might as well just do what you like"

To which I reply, "If you are incapable of telling what is right and wrong from considering your actions and understanding their effect on you and others without some guidance from the big ole guy in the sky, it's you who has the problem, not me"

But of course they never understand..

Free will, a sense of right and wrong or good and bad, and the idea that there are consequences for actions and responsibility for them are common ideas to all religions that i know of. And this does not just mean theistic religions with God given commandments and judgement. For example, Buddhism has the concept of karma which is not believed to be a law imposed by some big guy in the sky.

I disagree with the author that this is the fundamental difference between religion and science. It is true that modern science often takes the emergent stance to the mind-body problem, ie that the mind is epiphenomenal and arises from the physical events in the body (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-body_problem), but the mind-body problem is still a philosophical debate that has not been conclusively settled by science and to push the materialist theory authoritatively and then say the scientific evidence is too complex for the common man to understand is exactly what the major religions of the past are guilty of when they say it is God's will and He is too great for you to understand so you must just believe and obey. It is actually anti-science to do this. Science is about uncovering the truth, whatever that may be, not enforcing the dominant theories of the time onto the ignorant or onto the politically correct and "religious" scientists who manage to maintain a tolerance and openness for alternative viewpoints.

The quality Robin Holliday’s article is very disappointing. Its physical construction is careless and the arguments are so sloppily constructed and full of arrogance that he gives the theists the equivalent of an over's worth of long hops outside off-stump. His butchery of the free will issue is especially facile. While Alan Grey's response is full of the usual inanities, Robin makes it far too easy for him to get on his soapbox. As with Richard Dawkins, Holliday's apparent personal affront at the stubbornness of the rest of humanity in continuing to believe in supernatural explanations gets in the way of simply stating a reasoned and principled view of the problem.

As I think OldPro said above, it is the theists who propound the theory which has no evidential backing from several centuries of systematic investigation of the natural world. The burden of proof is on the theists to adduce evidence to support their theory.

However, regardless of its explanatory poverty and lack of evidential backing, religion is virtually ubiquitous among us humans. We are apparently compelled genetically to seek AND find causes and explanations. It is unfortunately true a fearful amount of education and above average intelligence to absorb sufficient of the available evidence and to stay with the analysis thereof until some dim comprehension dawns as to the astonishing ability of the natural world to generate, without supernatural intervention, the array of life we see around us and the subjective experience that we live. Lacking either of these blessings, it is almost inevitable that we duck sideways and throw the question into the divine Too-Hard Basket.

For the foreseeable future therefore, science and religion will co-exist in developed societies. It is unlikely that the defensively religious will be happy with this coexistence. It therefore rests on the science crew persistently to make their case in the most humane language possible and to insist that, to get equal time on matters pertaining to the natural world, participants must meet standards of evidence, procedural quality and explanatory power as rigorous as those that science seeks to impose on its practitioners.

Many here have merely listening to novices when it comes to understanding divinity. The divinity of the last century was "Science" supposedly had all the answers. But what's the scientific explosion done to the natural environment? What has science done to better human relationships? Science isn't more than analysis of chemical results. It doesn't answer the ultimate questions of why.

Holliday assumes the religious have, "a belief that the material human body is separable from a non-material soul". This is nonsense as the person is the soul, not has a soul. The body is the vehicle by which the person operates in the world and is not the totalitary of the person. The person is not what lies in the grave, but what the person is and what he/she has done in life that has caused change and influence on others. The "person" is the evidence of having lived that remains when the molecular structure of their body is nothing more than dust. We merely borrow from other life forms to fulfil our life on this planet, but we are other than the protein structures that we have absorbed. The ideas that Holliday have posted here is intrinsically him more than any cells that yesterday were part of his body that he exhaled or excreated.

When it comes to defining religion he believes all hold to, "a belief that humans have free will, a conscience, and the God-given ability to choose between good and evil". What is he stating here? Does science deny all these abilities of humanity? That they do not really exist? One wonders how he can willfully dismiss this conclusion held by the religious by using his choice to imagine science and religion are diametrically opposed? Does he have a will to free choice to make such a statement or has he been preprogrammed by his genetic forebears to hold such a conclusion?

It's important if one is to deny a total belief system that he properly evaluates and fuilly understands all tenents of his denoncement. Obviously he is merely stating his meagre opinion and belief

In the article under consideration, the author states that religions are based upon untruths. I assume that the author has made a lifelong study of religion and the relationship between matter and spirit to be able to make such a statement. I think not and therefore to make such a presumptuous statement is to be “not intellectually rigorous” The author is an expert in his field of evolutionary biology only and that frankly does not qualify him to talk with such authority about religion. To do so without studying the relationship between matter and spirit is to do what he accuses religious people of at the start of the article and that is to lack understanding of a field of knowledge.

The author states that DNA is a “polymeric chemical, with enormous coding capacity”. This is obviously true, but who wrote the code? Bill gates does not employ random number generators to write programs/code and neither does God. The simple fact of the matter is that the probability of obtaining DNA by random chance occurrence is 10-40,000. The odds are so astronomically small that Cosmologist Fred Hoyle is on record as having said “there is more chance of a tornado blowing through a junk yard and assembling a flight ready Boeing 747 than there is of DNA having formed by random chance mechanism. He further said that even if the whole universe (~10 to he power 80 fundamental particles) were primordial soup, that DNA could not have formed in the short 10 to the power16 seconds since creation.

It is also important to note that natural selection could not act before the first cell and that the by chance mechanism for the formation of the DNA molecule has been dropped by most serious scientists as long ago as the 1980s. The father of Chemical evolution Dean Kenyon has of course repudiated his life’s work in this area as he could not explain how cells could form without DNA. He could not answer the question as to where the code came from, neither can any body else.