What the New Atheists (and, for That Matter, Creationists Too) Got Right

Abstract

The reception of the so-called New Atheism in the 2000s in the intellectual community was harsh. Its main figures were accused of elaborating on a subject of which they were mostly ignorant. Criticism focused on the narrow way they described religion as a set of factual beliefs that compete with—and pale in the face of—modern science, instead of a life experience, an ethical orientation, an existential commitment, or a set of communal practices. In the spirit of S.J. Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria thesis, these critics contended that religion has little to do with factual assertions. This paper challenges this strict separation, arguing that many theistic traditions, such as Christianity, inherently make factual claims about the universe and history, intertwining their beliefs with cosmic realities. Following Ronald Dworkin’s posthumous distinction between the “science part” and the “value part” of religion, the paper underscores the philosophical legitimacy of religious factual claims, thus acknowledging the potential overlap between science and religion. In this sense, it argues that the New Atheists may have got wrong the meaning of religion in many people’s lives, but they got the “science part” right enough. In the same vein, it concludes that while creationists are most likely wrong in their account of the origin of life and biodiversity, their contestation in the factual domain cannot be discarded as a disfigurement of religion.

New Atheism was a movement that rose to global notoriety in the 2000s because of its renewed, unambiguous and aggressive critique of religion. Among its most prominent representatives were the so-called four horsemen: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. The content of their critique can be unpacked into two main arguments: on the one hand, triggered by the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalism, the New Atheists denounced religious belief as the root of violence, intolerance, and evil. On the other, troubled by the reappearance of pseudoscientific creationism under the modern guise of Intelligent Design, the New Atheists insisted on revaluing scientific rationality as an undisputed source of knowledge to navigate factual reality.

While they enjoyed unprecedented media and commercial popularity for an intellectual enterprise, their academic peers were merciless. From Terry Eagleton to Karen Armstrong, from John Gray to Mary Midgley, the New Atheist ‘fad’ was accused of theological illiteracy and philosophical shallowness. Contrary to what the New Atheists assume, these critics replied, religion is not about doctrinal beliefs and truth propositions but about life meanings and social practices. Similarly, they added, religion could never compete with science and, when unfortunate attempts are made to do so, as with creationists, it betrays true religion.

This paper weighs the justice of some of the criticism directed toward the New Atheists. While it does not defend their full set of arguments against religion, especially in the morality department, it does vindicate the theistic prerogative to make factual claims, that is, offering explanations to grasp the whole truth, including the material and causal dimensions of cosmic reality. The New Atheists may have missed their mark regarding many theological depths, but they were not wrong in identifying a domain in which religious traditions and people’s beliefs meet, coexist and eventually compete with other explanatory projects of factual reality, such as modern science. To that extent, their critics exhibit a rather paternalistic understanding, as well as an irreal demarcation, of the religious phenomenon, at least when it comes to theistic corpuses like Christianity. Consistently, the paper argues that the creationist claim to include God-friendly alternatives to Darwinian biology in the classroom cannot be discarded just because it happens to invade factual terrain, as Stephen Jay Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria thesis suggests. Both New Atheists and creationists, then, while vilified and mocked from various intellectual corners and snobberies, got—among many other wrongs—at least one thing right: most religious traditions seek to interpret cosmic reality as part of their general quest for the overall truth.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 introduces the main features of the New Atheist discourse, while Section 2 describes NOMA, the standard argument to reject religion’s “scientific” pretensions. Next, Section 3 recalls the strong grasp of religious realism, testimony to the human tendency to track God’s footprints in nature, while Section 4 argues for a philosophically legitimate “scientific” side of religion. Finally, Section 5 brings up the case of the creationist claim, justly dismissed for lacking sufficient evidence, but wrongly discharged for suggesting a supernatural agency acting though the cosmos. Some concluding remarks close the paper.

1. The New Atheism and Its Critics

The so-called New Atheism movement rose to prominence in the 2000s with the publication of the works of Sam Harris (2004), Richard Dawkins (2006), Daniel Dennett (2006), and Christopher Hitchens (2007), also known by the popular media as the “Four Horsemen” (Hitchens et al. 2019). Two factors are commonly cited to understand the why here, why now question: on the one hand, the impact of the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Islamic extremism since 9/11; on the other, the comeback of creationism disguised as intelligent design theory (henceforth, ID) to dispute Darwinian evolution in biology class and textbooks (Bullivant 2010; Stewart 2008). To these two triggering factors, others add a reaction to the increasingly postmodern discourse adopted by the left, original niche of most New Atheists, a discourse that combines epistemic relativism with multiculturalism (Beattie 2017). In sum, the New Atheist phenomena has been understood as an ideological defense of modernity, progress, scientific rationality, and Enlightenment values against both premodern vestiges—embodied in the persistence of religious superstition and backward traditions—and postmodern challenges—represented by skepticism about the possibility of universal knowledge provided by science and growing political deference to cultural diversity (LeDrew 2015).

The New Atheists’ view of religion provoked a cascade of responses (Berlinski 2009; Crean 2007; Day 2008; Feser 2010; Haught 2008; Hart 2009; McGrath and Collicut 2007; Reitan 2009). Instead of God being a delusion, many of these authors claimed, Dawkins et al. were the deluded. While religion is far from irrational, these respondents contended, atheism looks intellectually untenable. The New Atheists’ books, they all agreed, were replete with theological ignorance, gross misrepresentations, superficial readings, and selective evidence. Because these respondents were as harsh and derogatory as the igniters, the exchange did not lead to a productive debate. Participants in the New Atheist debate, it was noted, “did not wield the language of dialogue, but of battle” (Ryan 2014, p. 9). Shortly afterwards, a “second wave” of New Atheists entered the scene (LeDrew 2015, p. 46), including—in most cases by self-identification—the Somali activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, British philosopher A.C. Grayling, American biologist Jerry Coyne, Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker, the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, the particle physicist Victor Stenger, French philosopher Michel Onfray, the science writer Michael Shermer, American skeptic Peter Boghossian, and even comedian Bill Maher. The tone of the debate, however, did not change.

The New Atheist discourse lost its steam a few years after its emergence, partly due to its hostile reception from numerous intellectual corners, partly because the jihadist threat deflated, and partly because the supposedly anti-scientific right represented by the Bush administration in the U.S. gave way to Obama’s liberalism. At this late point, however, both the first and second wave of the New Atheists intensified its confrontation with what it took to be a radical left obsessed with a kind of identity politics and cultural sensitivity deemed incompatible with rational and universalistic values. This has been interpreted by several authors as a rightward journey from progressivism to conservatism, and even as a merger with the alt-right hosted on the dark web (LeDrew 2015; Hamburger 2019). In any case, even its critics recognize that its cultural influence cannot be minimized. The New Atheism, as a global intellectual movement, gave thousands of people around the world the will to “come out” of the closet (LeDrew 2015, p. 125), as it reduced the “social stigma” traditionally attached to atheism (Bullivant 2010, p. 123).

For the purposes of this paper, I shall divide the New Atheist critique of religion into a normative and epistemic objection. According to the former, sincerely held religious beliefs make people do bad things (as occurs with Islamic fundamentalism). For the latter, sincere religious beliefs make people assert irrational propositions (as with creationism). Both are cognitive in a general sense, as they highlight the mobilizing role of beliefs. This has been widely recognized as a central feature in all New Atheist writings, that is, the centrality ascribed to belief—understood as intellectual assent to a set of coherent propositions—over other sources of religious identity and authority such as practice, community, tradition, or experience (Gray 2018; Hamburger 2019; LeDrew 2015; Stahl 2010).

I will not refer to the normative objection throughout this paper. Instead, I shall focus on the epistemic objection, namely the idea that religion consists of truth propositions about factual reality. Most New Atheists are scientists. In many cases, they assert that science has already disproved long-standing religious truth propositions about the factual world. They thus assume that science and religion are competing for the same explanatory space. According to Dawkins, “the presence or absence of a creative super intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice—or not yet—a decided one” (Dawkins 2006, p. 82). Stenger argues that “God should be detectable by scientific means simply by virtue of the fact that he is supposed to play such a central role in the operation of the universe and the lives of humans” (Stenger 2007, p. 13). While religion’s most fundamental factual claim is the existence of God—what many New Atheists call the ‘God Hypothesis’—there are many other important factual claims made by religious traditions. Dawkins goes on to ask whether Jesus’ mother was indeed a virgin, whether Lazarus was raised from the dead, and of course whether Jesus himself came alive again three days after being crucified. Regardless of the available evidence to answer these questions, Dawkins argues that each is “a strictly scientific question with a definitive answer in principle: yes, or no” (Dawkins 2006, p. 83). Including miracles, Stenger adds, most religions make factual pronouncements “which science is free to evaluate … [they have] no immunity from being examined under the cold light of reason and objective observation” (Stenger 2007, p. 10).

Friend and foe agree that this is perhaps the trademark of the New Atheist clan. According to Coyne, this is “the most novel aspect of New Atheism … the observation that most religions are grounded in claims that can be regarded as scientific” (Coyne 2015, p. xii), in the sense that they can be treated as hypotheses to be confirmed or discarded by evidential means. Whether they are scientists or not, “the assumption that the purpose of religion is to explain nature … is one major idea shared by all the New Atheists” (LeDrew 2015, p. 66). To the extent it has one, Whitley Kaufman argues, “this is the guiding philosophical premise of the New Atheism … that the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis to be assessed just like any other scientific claim” (Kaufman 2019, p. 2).

Most of the intellectual backlash against the New Atheists focused on this one major idea or guiding philosophical premise. According to its critics, the problem is not only that New Atheism confuses religion with a set of propositional beliefs or doctrinal creeds instead of viewing religion as an existential commitment, moral guidance, and ritual practice; on top of that, it is argued that science and religion are in competition over which one better explains factual reality. This is surely a gross misunderstanding of the nature of both science and religion, since their aims, when properly grasped, do not conflict. They are supposed to be, as famously stated, non-overlapping magisteria. To this principle we turn in the next section.

2. The Non-Overlapping Magisteria Thesis

The view that science and religion do not compete for the same explanatory space, and therefore do not conflict with one another, is an old one. It has been advanced every time philosophers and historians have disputed the warfare narrative. Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the fiercest defenders of Darwin’s ideas, made this principle of non-overlapping fields of inquiry the basis for his personal reconciliation of science and religion. Huxley—also known for fathering the notion of agnosticism—thought that religion belonged to the realm of feelings, while science belonged to the world of intellectual reflection. In his view, both were equally valuable in the pursuit of a fulfilled life (Lightman 2014). The same idea was later reformulated by the celebrated biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who argued that “science and religion deal with different aspects of existence. If one dares to schematize for the sake of clarity, one may say that these are the aspect of fact and the aspect of meaning” (Dobzhansky 1971, p. 96). For Dobzhansky—a Russian Orthodox Christian—religion was alien to the realm of factuality.

The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould constructed the most complete theory of non-overlapping teaching authorities or ‘magisteria’; hence, the acronym NOMA. According to NOMA, Darwinism—or any other discovery in the natural sciences—can never really undermine theistic beliefs, because these areas of knowledge and professional expertise do not overlap with each other. In Gould’s understanding, science deals with “the factual character of the natural world”, whereas religion operates “in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values” (Gould 1999, p. 4). No conflict arises if each subject remains in its exclusive magisterium or sovereign domain of teaching authority. Apologizing for the cliché, Gould adds that scientists get “the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven” (Gould 1999, p. 6). In exchange for asking religion to remain outside the scope of factual explanation, Gould argues that science should refrain from moral reflections and ethical judgments. All reported clashes between evolutionists and creationists have, he suggests, been typical misunderstandings of the NOMA principle. This view proposes that creationism is grounded on a misapprehension of the essential nature of religion, which should remain silent in the face of factual debate, and instead revolve around ethical values and spiritual meaning.

Most of the criticism addressed by mainstream philosophers to the New Atheists’ epistemic objection has a NOMA flavor to it. They accuse Dawkins et al. of grossly misinterpreting the true character of religion by portraying God as a scientific hypothesis to be confirmed or dismissed depending on the empirical evidence. In truth, the argument goes, religion is not—and was never meant to be—an explanatory project about spatiotemporal factuality. It is not a cognitivist set of truth propositions, rather an existential commitment. Accordingly, it has nothing to do with the scientific effort to make sense of the natural world. As the late British philosopher Mary Midgley argued, “a faith is not primarily a factual belief, the acceptance of a few extra propositions like God exists or there will be a revolution. It is rather the sense of having one’s place within a whole greater than oneself” (Midgley 2002, p. 16). To Midgley’s mind, this religious sense does not need to involve any factual belief at all. Moreover, she argues that “the religion which does clash with science … has left its own sphere” and is therefore “bad religion” (Midgley 2002, p. 14). Creationism, to that extent, is like Spencerism or Social Darwinism, as “it confuses the functions of religion and science, attempting to produce an amalgam which will do the work of both”, thus distorting “not just the province which they are trying to take over, but also the one in whose name they want to make the conquest” (Midgley 2002, p. 173).

Along the same lines, the cultural theorist and intellectual-at-large Terry Eagleton has defended the idea underlying NOMA, arguing that religion is far from being concerned about factual reality and cosmic explanations, and therefore “science and theology are for the most part not talking about the same kind of things, any more than orthodontics and literary criticism are” (Eagleton 2009, p. 10). Following Gould’s argument, Eagleton believes that the New Atheists are making “an error of genre, or category mistake, about the kind of thing Christian belief is” (Eagleton 2009, p. 6). In the believer’s mind, God does not behave as a mega manufacturer or interventionist ruler, but He is “the reason why there is something rather than nothing” (Eagleton 2009, p. 7). By extension, Eagleton’s criticism also targets creationists who misunderstand their very own faith. Religious faith is not propositional, he concludes, not even with respect to the proposition that there is a Supreme Being, but it is “the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love” (Eagleton 2009, p. 37).

Similarly, another intellectual-at-large, the English philosopher John Gray, has argued that “religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe” (Gray 2018, p. 3). Even if everything could be explained”, Gray insists, “the need for meaning … would remain unsatisfied” (Gray 2018, p. 12). In Gray’s overview of all types of atheism, the New Atheists stand out for being “unwitting disciples of Comte’s Positivist philosophy”, for whom “it seems self-evident … that religion is a primitive sort of science” (Gray 2018, p. 9). Part of the blame for this confusion, Gray argues, “comes from theists peddling an Argument from Design … [who] have tried to develop theories that explain the origin of the universe and humankind better than prevailing scientific accounts”, thereby “conceding to science an unwarranted authority over other ways of thinking” (Gray 2018, p. 12). In this context, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek notes that “the occurrence of the term science in the very name of some of the fundamentalist sects—Christian Science, Scientology—is not just an obscene joke but signals this reduction of belief to positive knowledge” (Žižek 2008, pp. 31–32).

In one of the first academic volumes dedicated to the New Atheist phenomenon, the sociologist Ryan Falcioni contends that religious claims cannot be expressed as hypotheses about the world because “they don’t function this way in the lives of believers in any noticeable way” (Falcioni 2010, p. 211). Believers do not usually wait for evidential confirmation to believe in God or the supernatural. Religious claims, Falcioni argues, do not serve as scientific hypotheses because they are not assertional enough. Rather than assenting to a set of propositions or truth claims, faith is supposed to be about existential commitments. To be a Christian, for example, “is to live in a certain way; to accept the demand upon your life that Christ has made”, and it has nothing to do with “the soundness of the evidential proof for the God Hypothesis … [as] their beliefs are not predicated upon any objective grounds” (Falcioni 2010, pp. 218–19). This view is shared by some eminent philosophers who work right at the intersection between science and religion. Roy Clouser, for instance, argues that “religious beliefs are not hypotheses, so pointing to confirming consequences of them cannot provide an argument to the best explanation as it can for theories” (Clouser 2001, p. 530). In turn, Ian Barbour suggests “that the concept of God is not a hypothesis formulated to explain the relation between particular events in the world in competition with scientific hypotheses” (Clouser 2001, p. 14). Belief in God, Barber adds, “is primarily a commitment to a way of life in response to distinctive kinds of religious experience in communities formed by historical traditions, [and] it is not a substitute for scientific research” (Clouser 2001, p. 14).

Hence, it appears that the New Atheists’ signature assertion of the “irrefutable triumph of scientific rationalism over religion” (Beattie 2017, p. 135) leaves true religion unscathed, while making them worthy of taunts. If NOMA stands, as endorsed one way or the other by all authors presented in this section, then the New Atheist epistemic objection to religion irredeemably collapses.

3. The Strong Grasp of Religious Realism

The NOMA principle states that true believers are not really interested in truth propositions about cosmic reality, do not compete for the best factual explanation, and thus abide by rulings provided by science over how the heavens go. Therefore, New Atheists are utterly mistaken when addressing religion as a set of assertional beliefs instead of an existential guide about how to go to heaven. Religious faith has thus nothing to do in the field where science works. This picture is unconvincing for several reasons.

First, most religions cannot be divested from factual claims insofar as they aim to present a true comprehensive picture of the human experience. Within theological quarters, NOMA has been criticized insofar as it reduces religion to a moral philosophy, detached from any cosmic explanatory aim. Assessing Gould’s proposal, the prominent Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga states that “of course this is much too strong: clearly most religions make factual claims: that there is such a person as God, that the world was created, that Mohammed was God’s prophet and spokesman” (Plantinga 2001a, p. 784). He recalls that “some of the teachings most central to Scripture and to the Christian faith tell us of concrete historical events; they therefore tell us of the history and properties of things within the cosmos” (Plantinga 2001b, p. 117). The Protestant philosopher Robert C. Koons refers to the idea that science reigns undisturbed in the magisterium of factuality, to use “Stephen Jay Gould’s ominous phrase” (Koons 2003, p. 73). The Catholic cardinal Christoph Schönborn has dubbed the NOMA principle as simply “untenable” (Schönborn 2008, p. 92), while social epistemologist Steve Fuller describes the motivation behind NOMA as “condescending” (Fuller 2010, p. 65). To Phillip Johnson, the so-called father of the ID movement, NOMA is “naturalistic metaphysics in a nutshell, and its version of separate but equals means about what the same phrase did in the days of Jim Crow” (Johnson [1991] 2010, p. 195).

To the extent that religious traditions make factual claims in which science has something to say, in principle, some overlap is expected. As the theologian Alister McGrath has proposed, we should abandon NOMA for a POMA solution: science and religion stand as “partially overlapping magisteria” (McGrath and Collicut 2007, p. 19). The overlapping zone is the specific area in which both cultural projects and discursive traditions coexist and eventually compete for the same explanatory space, to make sense of the world we inhabit. Against Eagleton—who holds that Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything—McGrath retorts that “this explanatory theme is part of its rich heritage” (McGrath 2015, p. 67). Of course, there is more to theism than that. Yet, as McGrath notes, “the intellectual capaciousness of faith cannot be overlooked, especially its discernment of a deeper structure to the world which helps us grasp our own position within it and live our lives more authentically” (McGrath 2015, p. 67).

This is especially true for realist theological traditions. Religious realism “argues that although religions are psychological and sociological phenomena, they make truth-claims about reality, especially about unobservables like God” (Reichenbach 2010, p. 1034). Realism, in a nutshell, is the attempt to maximize the correlation between epistemological input and ontological belief, in line with the so-called correspondence theory of truth. As the epistemic capacities of scientific reasoning to deliver accurate pictures of the perceptible world are highly and commonly esteemed, realist theologies are compelled to integrate them when constructing an overall truth picture of human existence. As John Polkinghorne puts it, “scientists and theologians of a realist cast of mind, have one important commitment in common: they both believe that there is a truth to be found or, more realistically, to be approximated to” (Polkinghorne 1998, p. 45). The separate discourses approach, Kent Greenawalt argues, “founders on the reality that scientists and religious believers both care about what is really true, overall” (Greenawalt 2005, p. 96). As the Episcopalian legal scholar Stephen L. Carter has observed for creationist parents, they “are asking the school to teach the truth—not the moral truth with which religion is commonly associated in our dialogue, but a truth about the real world” (Carter 1994, p. 180). Surely, not every truth claim is susceptible to being decided upon by evidential and universally accessible means. However, it is widely accepted that the pronouncements of science correspond to some of our best cognitive wagers to represent the structure, workings, and features of the factual world. Thus, if the aim is to have a verisimilar idea of such a world, the powers of science can hardly be ignored.

In sum, while religious commitment might be crucially performative, we cannot rule out religion’s propositional dimension. At least for religious traditions interested in making sense of the whole world, and not just a subset of it, factual claims are integral to their faith. Theism, as Polkinghorne observes, “is concerned with making total sense of the world…the force of its claims depends upon the degree to which belief in God affords the best explanation of the varieties, not just of the religious experiences, but of all human experiences” (Polkinghorne 1998, p. 24). This resounds with the Catholic tradition, in which the “cosmic aspect of religion” merges and becomes one with “the existential aspect, the question of redemption” (Schönborn 2008, p. 21). In this view, theistic belief “cannot remain without points of contact with the concrete exploration of the world” (Schönborn 2008, p. 92). Critics of the New Atheists are simply mistaken when describing religion—at least when it comes to realist traditions such as Christianity—as indifferent or detached from its ancestral explanatory side.

Secondly, it is crucial to note that some of these factual claims are foundational to other decisive religious beliefs, of a metaphysical or even moral character. Christians truly believe that Jesus rose to the heavens after being crucified by the Romans. This is a factual claim intermingled with a historical reading. If this turned out to be false—or merely metaphorical—the Christian faith would be in a predicament. If Christ be not raised”, St. Paul wrote to the Greeks, then “your faith is vain” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Eagleton concedes that (certain) religious claims still require evidence to be backed, as they are not intended as poetic expressions or subjective truths. The resurrection is a paradigmatic case. Paraphrasing St. Paul, Eagleton observes that, “if Jesus’ body is mingled with the dust of Palestine, Christian faith is in vain” (Eagleton 2009, p. 116). In turn, Gray acknowledges that “if Jesus was not crucified and did not return from the dead, the Christian religion is seriously compromised”, concluding that “the real conflict is not between religion and science but between Christianity and history” (Gray 2018, p. 15). Even these ferocious critics have no alternative but to recognize that religions—or at least some of them, like Christianity—have a vested interest in factual reality.

Beyond the Christian resurrection, the same goes for other concrete spatiotemporal episodes and factual assertions that are central to theistic religious narratives. Devout Muslims truly believe that Mohammed existed as Allah’s messenger and ascended into Heaven on a winged horse to receive instructions about praying. Most Mormons believe that Joseph Smith translated a brand-new gospel from golden plates and that he was visited by God somewhere near Utah. The virginity of Mary—as a physiological state related to her sexual organs and not as a psychological state with respect to her naivety or innocence—has been exalted as a template for moral virtue. Reichenbach highlights the “phenomenal dimension of the incarnation” as a case in point: the human Jesus “who was born in Roman-occupied Palestine, had the occupation of rabbi or teacher, had followers whom he taught, and died for blasphemy at the hands of the Romans at the behest of Jewish religious leaders” (Reichenbach 2010, p. 1045). These were observable facts, “as were his actions of healing persons and altering the natural flow of events” such as “walking on water or multiplying bread and fish for the crowd” (Reichenbach 2010, p. 1045). In all these cases, religious narratives are inextricably linked to a set of factual claims that are embraced as foundational. Theology, Polkinghorne observes, “must always seek to relate its concepts to the foundational events of its traditions” (Polkinghorne 1998, p. 46). When these foundational events are disputed by different sciences, the theological tree of knowledge is shaken. There is no way to minimize this potential conflict. Indeed, many of the historical events and factual claims that ground theistic beliefs have been rendered much less plausible in the light of modern science, like “the existence of virgin births, bodily resurrections, a soul separate from the brain and body, and so on” (Coyne 2012, p. 2656).

Of course, some theological claims—even if they are stated in a propositional manner—are difficult to assess. Falcioni asks, “what evidence could one offer for the claim that Jesus died for the sins of the world, that Muhammad is the seal of the prophets, or that God is love?” (Falcioni 2010, p. 220). While “these beliefs are at the core of their respective traditions”, Falcioni himself replies, “they do not seem to be amenable to scientific or even broadly evidential investigation” (Falcioni 2010, p. 220). But this reasoning confuses two claims. Evidence of Jesus dying for our sins is surely different from evidence of Jesus coming back from the dead, as the former is a statement about his intentions (arguably difficult to assess) and the latter a very factual declaration (amenable to broad investigation). Furthermore, the practical difficulties of assembling an evidential case do not amount to the principled impossibility of such a task, as revealed by the continuous efforts to discern the validity of the Turin Shroud.

Other typically religious claims remain in a gray area, at least until we have new insights and ways to approach them. For instance, the official Catholic doctrine has accepted the main theme of Darwinism but insists that the spiritual soul was created directly from God at some point in our evolutionary history. Given the methodological constraints, scientists might not have the intellectual tools to prove or disprove such a claim. But it is still a factual proposition that is constitutive of the Christian faith. In principle, it could be factually true as it could be factually false. If it turns out to be false, this is bad news for Catholicism. Thus, the Church has a reasonably vested interest in the favorable resolution of such claims. The idea that religion has a vested interest in scientific discoveries was made clear by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Humani Generis, in which he recognized that some questions that “pertain to the positive sciences … are nevertheless more or less connected with the truths of the Christian faith” (Pope Pius XII 1950). To the extent that the doctrine given by God through the scriptures or the tradition is involved, Pius XII argued, the Church cannot right away admit scientific pronouncements that directly or indirectly oppose it.

In sum, theistic narratives cannot afford to be aprioristically silent on factual matters insofar as they touch on questions relevant to the building of their faith. Again, this is not incompatible with acknowledging that religion is also a way of life. But, as Barbour acutely notes, “a way of life presupposes beliefs about the nature of reality and cannot be sustained if those beliefs are no longer credible” (Barbour 2000, p. 37). Even the most basic theistic proposition—God exists—is stated with the intention of implying a factual reality, regardless of the level at which such a reality is manifested. If such a god does not exist in reality—but only as an expression of our dearest moral convictions and desire to live decent lives—much of the appeal of traditional theism is lost beyond repair. For Christians, for example, “a God who is just an internalized symbol of [their] commitment to the highest values may provide a focus for living but such a God is not the ground of hope in the face of death and beyond death” (Polkinghorne 1998, p. 45).

Third, the pervasiveness of religious realism relates to the long tradition of natural theology. This is the project that aims to prove the existence and attributes of God through the observation of nature by purely rational means. The ‘argument from design’ is perhaps its most paradigmatic expression, as it states that traces of divine intention are imprinted in the world that surrounds us. Despite Hume and Darwin, the argument from design enjoys good health among the general theistic population, and the basic intuitions underlying natural theology are continuously endorsed by theologians and philosophers of religion alike. Like Žižek, critics of the New Atheists contend that their “one-dimensional and impoverished understanding of religion” mirrors religious fundamentalists in their epistemology, as both “are engaged in a quest for certainty, for an authoritative foundation that can ground a normative order” (Stahl 2010, p. 99). It is not just fringe fundamentalists, however. As Falcioni acknowledges, the New Atheist movement may fail to do justice to religious belief as he sees it, but “much of the academic philosophy of religion actually supports the view of religious belief—as hypotheses standing in need of evidence—offered by the new atheists” (Falcioni 2010, p. 204). The view that some religious claims are susceptible to evidential scrutiny—be it scientific, historical or otherwise—is far from marginal.

Take the influential work of Richard Swinburne, who has made a career arguing that the evidence of order in the world increases the probability of theistic hypotheses. As he puts it, “on our total evidence, theism is more probable than not” (Swinburne 1979, p. 291). Here, Swinburne is not too far from Dawkins in the sense that both believe that questions about God’s existence, agency, and properties are ultimately questions about the truth of factual propositions, which are open to rational investigation. This view has received important support from scientists such as Freeman Dyson and Francis Collins, involving fields ranging from physics to genetics. They all believe that nature speaks loudly about a super-intelligent creator. In cosmology, for instance, the anthropic principle suggests that the universe is fine-tuned for the appearance of human life. In quantum physics, the indeterminacy principle has been interpreted as a way in which God acts to actualize a given potentiality from a range of possibilities. The case of biological design is just another expression of the view that natural science could eventually confirm theism. Many religious thinkers believe that “materialism has a tough time with a universe that reeks of design” (Behe 1998).

Some of these arguments are not offered in the classical spirit of natural theology, but in a reformulation that goes by the name of ‘theology of nature’. While natural theology aims to show evidence of God’s deeds in the perceptible universe, a theology of nature starts from theistic assumptions and makes sense of scientific discoveries in the light of those assumptions. Despite their differences, both approaches reject the idea that theistic religions lack an explanatory side, and thus disagree with the notion of a confined-to-values theism. Further, both theologies are willing to challenge materialistic understandings of the universe in the hope that scientific research and reflection will confirm the rational plausibility of God’s providential intervention. Swinburne claims that “the very same criteria which scientists use to reach their own theories lead us to move beyond those theories to a creator God who sustains everything in existence” (Swinburne 1996, p. 2). From a Catholic perspective, Schönborn remarks that “the observation of nature, the investigation of the universe, of the earth, of life speaks to us with overwhelming evidence of order, plan, fine-tuning, intention and purpose” (Schönborn 2008, p. 95). From a Protestant perspective, Koons concludes that “the new knowledge we have acquired recently, including evidence for the Big Bang, anthropic coincidences, the fantastic complexity and functionality of biological systems, and the deepening intractability of naturalistic explanations for the origin of life and consciousness, support theism” (Koons 2003, p. 73). Finally, McGrath recognizes that, in some respects, science has eroded the plausibility of certain religious claims. But in other respects, he retorts, the opposite is true. For instance, “the standard cosmological model resonates with a Christian narrative of creation, much to the annoyance of atheists” (McGrath 2015, p. 73).

Lastly, if the true meaning of religious faith should be tracked in the life of actual believers, it might be argued—against the New Atheists’ critique—that too many theistic believers are of what Polkinghorne calls a “realist cast of mind”. Religion still plays an explanatory role in many milieus. If the meaning of religion is defined by what actual people believe, “the great majority of the world’s religious people would be surprised to learn that religion has nothing to do with factual reality” (Weinberg 1992, p. 191). As I have suggested, the argument from design remains popular, and tens of millions of people still believe that the Earth is 6000 years old (Pigliucci 1999). Empirical research shows that ordinary believers and nonbelievers see theism and science as offering competing answers for many of the same phenomena, to the extent that those phenomena are relevant to people’s understanding of their place in the world. Such competition for explanatory space can sometimes trigger social and political conflict, as is the case with the origins of life and biodiversity. Sadly for NOMA’s non-aggression policy, this may be a zero-sum game. If religion sticks to supernatural hypotheses to account for natural phenomena, as John Dewey (1934) foresaw, its reputation will be impoverished insofar as increasingly educated people will feel driven away from it. Psychologists Jesse Preston and Nicholas Epley confirm that “conflict between science and religion over this prime explanatory space may create a negative association between the two, such that the value of one may be inversely related to the automatic evaluations of the other” (Preston and Epley 2009, p. 240). In other words, as the explanatory power of science increases, religion’s credentials to account for the world are depreciated, and vice versa, which explains why the value of religious explanations is enhanced when scientific explanations are considered poor.

To sum up, there is no way around the fact that too many people understand religion as inseparable from truth propositions about cosmic reality. Realist theistic traditions make factual claims, some crucial religious beliefs are grounded on factual assertions, believers continue searching for the traces of God in nature, and empirical research confirms that too many people think of religion and science as competitors for the same explanatory space. NOMA simply does not hold water.

4. The “Scientific” Side of Religion

The New Atheists are lambasted for their understanding of religion, which is deemed reductive, shallow, and misinformed. Primarily, critics argue, religion is not—and has never intended to be—a project aimed at explaining the world that surrounds us, but is about ultimate meaning, existential commitment, and communal practices. In the previous section, I showed that a core assumption of New Atheists—namely, that important proponents of religious traditions care about factual reality as part of their non-negotiable claim to make sense of the whole truth—largely corresponds with an ancestral need that is alive and well in the traditions and beliefs of the faithful. In this section, I shall draw from the late Ronald Dworkin’s distinction between religion’s constitutive “parts” in order to reformulate Gould’s NOMA, in a way that is more consistent with a capacious understanding of religion. Additionally, it confirms some of the New Atheists’ claims.

As shown in Section 2, Gould distinguishes between the magisterium of science and the magisterium of religion, as if they were two distinct domains of human inquiry. At a certain point, however, Gould alters the formulation and refers respectively to the magisterium of factuality and the magisterium of ethics and value. In Gould’s mind, science and factuality go together, in the same way that religion corresponds to ethics and value. I have shown that this is problematic since religions make factual claims and cannot be confined to moral philosophy. But Gould’s reformulation is nonetheless useful: there are indeed two distinctive domains of inquiry, one exploring factual reality, the other reflecting on ethics and meaning. However, within each domain, certain modes of inquiry are suitable or more conducive to reliable conclusions. Scientific reasoning is a mode of inquiry that typically operates within the domain of factuality. It is not the only one, as other modes of inquiry address factual questions too, such as historical methods, ethnographic research, judicial procedures, journalistic investigations, archival analysis, and simulation models, to name a few. Revelation is also a mode of inquiry, to the extent that it discloses or unveils certain truths and facts, yet one that operates under very specific epistemic conditions such as the (divine) source of knowledge and its experiential (but non-empirical) character. So, the magisterium of factuality should not be identified with strict scientific means. This is perhaps what the British theologian Keith Ward had in mind when arguing that “the question of God is certainly a factual one, but certainly not a scientific one” (Ward 2008, p. 30).

In his last work devoted to religion, the liberal philosopher—and religious atheist, according to his own account—Ronald Dworkin provided a distinction to clarify the point. Theistic beliefs, he suggested, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, can be disaggregated into two “parts”: a science part and a value part. I quote him at length:

“The science part offers answers to important factual questions about the birth and history of the universe, the origin of human life, and whether or not people survive their own death. That part declares that an all-powerful and all-knowing god created the universe, judges human lives, guarantees an afterlife, and responds to prayers. Of course, I do not mean that these religions offer what we count as scientific arguments for the existence and career of their god. I mean only that this part of many religions makes claims about matters of fact and about historical and contemporary causes and effects. Some believers do defend these claims with what they take to be scientific arguments; others profess to believe them as a matter of faith or through the evidence of sacred texts. I call them all scientific in virtue of their content, not their defense”.

(Dworkin 2013, p. 23)

Dworkin’s nomenclature is helpful. Most theistic traditions put forward claims that are sometimes called scientific by virtue of their content, since they address matters of factual reality. This is regardless of the method for their defense, which can be properly scientific or otherwise. What Dworkin calls content represents the domain of inquiry, while Dworkin’s notion of defense represents the mode of inquiry. Any strong version of NOMA suggesting that religion should keep its nose out of scientific problems in the sense of factual problems is doomed. As became clear in the previous section, religions make claims that are posited as truth propositions in the factual domain. Once again, this is not the same as saying that theism should be understood first and foremost as an explanatory enterprise, or that religion’s central aim is to provide better answers than science. If this is all there is to religion for the New Atheists, then it is certainly reductive and mistaken. But it is also wrong, as purported by their critics, to deprive religion—specifically theistic traditions such as Christianity—of its legitimate interest in the magisterium of factuality as a domain, if not necessarily mode, of inquiry.

Gould is surely right when he espouses that “science rules the magisterium of factual truth about nature” (Gould 1999, p. 22). It rules within this domain because it has proven highly useful in relation to the task. But this does not mean that other modes of cognition or knowledge-generator systems cannot aspire to do better or to provide alternative, complementary, or supplementary pictures. As noted by Dworkin, religious believers participate in the domain of factuality employing scientific arguments, but also others derived from faith or revelation. The creationist fauna is a case in point: while some rest on the authority of their sacred texts, like young-Earth creationists, others try to advance proper scientific arguments, such as ID advocators. Commenting on the ID biochemist Michael Behe’s work, the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that “this seems on the face of it to be a scientific claim, about what the evidence suggests, and one that is not self-evidently absurd” (Nagel 2008, p. 192). Nagel is not that generous with hardline creationism, which he believes is barely scientific.

To reiterate, these are all different modes of inquiry—what Dworkin calls defense—which apply to the same domain—what Dworkin calls content. The conceptual problem with NOMA is that it fails to see the difference between domains and modes of inquiry by straightforwardly conflating science with positive factual knowledge and religion with normative morals. If anything, we should embrace Gould’s reformulated distinction between a magisterium of factuality and a magisterium of ethics and meaning. Thus reframed, this functional separation remains consistent with Hume’s Law—in the sense that facts cannot linearly dictate values—whilst allowing theistic factual claims.

I am inclined to believe that Gould would not have accepted this restatement. Take the following passage: when presenting the episode of Doubting Thomas, who did not believe the news of Jesus’ resurrection until he could see and touch his wounds, Gould notes that the disciple was “espousing the key principle of science while operating within the different magisterium of faith” (Gould 1999, p. 16). But this cannot be right in the light of the restated NOMA. Doubting Thomas was not acting in the “wrong magisterium”, as Gould suggests, but was rather asking a very factual question indeed: was his late Master wandering around with open sores on his hands, or not? Maybe his mode of inquiry was too scientific for a setting in which faith should have been enough.

Instead, Gould accepts that a magisterium of ethics and meaning should not be monopolized by institutional religion. He acknowledges that the domain of value and morals largely exceeds the jurisdiction of traditional theism, and other nonreligious philosophical outlooks—such as secular humanism—coexist and eventually compete in this terrain. This conceptual breadth contrasts with his narrow identification between science and factuality. Gould—and most critics of the New Atheists, for that matter—missed that religion is too multifaceted a phenomenon to account for (just) values and morals, as it has an important factual department. Theistic traditions usually possess a cosmological narrative, a rich account of historical episodes that took place in spatiotemporal reality, and some ideas about how a supernatural force could intervene in the world in a way that is discernible to our intelligence. Theistic religions are not just moral philosophies but legitimate stakeholders in the magisterium of factual inquiry. Hence, they cannot be aprioristically disqualified from the ebullient dispute over the history of life on Earth or any other factual controversy in which science also participates as a mode of inquiry.

The New Atheists got at least this feature right: religions have what Dworkin called a “scientific part”, meaning the broad domain of inquiry that covers propositional claims and assertions about factual reality. Although not only scientific means can be employed to advance knowledge claims in this domain, religious traditions and theistic believers of a realist mind could appeal to the kind of evidential means that we associate with the scientific method.

5. The Creationist Claim

Creationists have been heavily criticized for demanding the teaching of alternatives to Darwinian evolution in the biology classroom, not only because their theories have been scientifically discarded or superseded in the last one hundred and fifty years, but mainly because they are making a religious claim—the intervention of a supernatural agency- within a scientific territory—the origin of life and the history of biodiversity. Like their New Atheist counterparts, creationists are thus indicted for violating NOMA as well as for misunderstanding religion. In this last section, I argue that these charges should be dropped. As we have already showed, Gould’s original NOMA is untenable. Furthermore, we have stated that theistic religions have legitimate interests in the domain of factuality, so it is as impossible as it is patronizing to compel them to renounce it.

Creationism has different strands, from biblical versions—such as young-Earth creationism or so-called creation science, as defended by Morris and Whitcomb (1961)—to the more sophisticated versions that accept large portions of mainstream evolutionary theory but dispute that a purely naturalistic and non-teleological evolution is sufficient to explain the origin, development, and diversity of life, and that we should therefore consider the directed action of a conscious agent—such as ID theory, as defended by Johnson ([1991] 2010), Behe (1996), Campbell and Meyer (2003), and Dembski (2006). Despite their differences, all claim that these accounts are not grounded in faith alone but held with rational and evidential means. In Dworkin’s terms, they are not only scientific in virtue of their content—as they attempt to provide answers to “important factual questions about the birth and history of the universe [and] the origin of human life” (Dworkin 2013, p. 23)—but also in virtue of their defense, as they advance “what they take to be scientific arguments” (Dworkin 2013, p. 23). In the case of ID, its proponents stress that their conclusions “flow naturally from the data itself, not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs” (Behe 1996, p. 193). To the extent that these different versions endorse a providential account of the history of life, in which nature is not self-sufficient as it requires a supernatural agency that intervenes throughout the cosmos via acts of special creation, I treat them all as creationist in a broad sense.

The creationist claim to be considered within the science curriculum has two different grounds: one substantive and the other epistemic (Bellolio 2020a). According to the substantive leg, creationist alternatives to Darwinian evolution should be integrated as a way of metaphysical balance, since the mainstream theory of evolution by natural selection is not neutral but nudges students into a naturalistic mindset that rivals traditional theistic understandings. From the epistemic perspective, creationists petition that non-naturalistic hypotheses be admitted for scientific consideration, and not disqualified from the very outset of the competition for the best explanation, under the pretext that science works with the rule of methodological naturalism. As Plantinga puts it, methodological naturalism operates as a sort of “provisional atheism” (Plantinga 2001b, p. 137), which is arguably unfair for those who believe that God’s footprints are traceable in nature. Both the substantive and epistemic claims are put forward by creationists as an implication of the liberal promise of religious neutrality in the so-called curriculum debates (Bellolio 2020a, 2020b).

Should we then include creationist views in the mandatory science curriculum either for substantive or epistemic reasons? Not necessarily. Regarding substantive reasons, we may retort that established scientific facts—such as Darwinian evolution—are taught so that students have an updated and accurate view of how the world works within the best knowledge available, and not with the aim of indoctrinating young minds into a particular comprehensive philosophy, whether secular or religious. There is no need to deny that some scientific theories may have cascade effects in other beliefs. Dawkins speaks for many New Atheists in saying that “although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (Dawkins 1986, p. 6). Dennett wrote that evolutionary theory works as a “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept” (Dennett 1995, p. 63), and while evolution does not prove the inexistence of God, it crucially undermines the argument from design, which is “the best argument anybody ever thought of for the existence of God” (Dennett 2007, p. 139). Creationists agree. Phillip Johnson has made a career arguing that Darwinists are “converting the nation’s schoolchildren to a naturalistic outlook, [so] it may become more and more difficult to conceal the religious implications of their system” (Johnson 2001, p. 75).

But these cascade effects are not for the science classroom to patrol or define. Many other religious people believe that the theory of evolution, at least short of naturalistic grafts or addenda, does not collide with religion. As Plantinga (2011) has forcefully argued, the conflict is not between scientific evolution and religion, but between naturalism—as a comprehensive philosophy or Weltanschauung—and religion. It might also be replied that the question of school education should be addressed with the children’s future—rather than parental prerogatives—in mind, considering what we owe them as a matter of justice (Dwyer 1998; Pennock 2001). For the sake of equal opportunities, this might entail teaching the “momentous propositions” that are foundational to much of all life sciences—in this case, evolutionary biology (Tillson 2017, p. 185). It might finally be retorted that the purpose of scientific education is not that the students believe that any given claim is true, only that they must know that it stands for the prevalent scientific consensus, thus playing down the charge of naturalistic indoctrination (Smith and Siegel 2004).

Regarding the epistemic side of the creationist claim, it is difficult to embrace methodological naturalism without metaphysical unfairness. Creationists reasonably contend that the state should not officially demarcate science—nor religion, for that matter—in a way that betrays its promise of liberal neutrality (Bellolio 2020b). Religions are legitimate bidders in the magisteria of factuality. If their arguments are not scientific but based on faith alone, they will not win the quest for the best factual explanation in such a domain of inquiry. But they also can put forward scientific reasons, as Nagel believes they do in the case of ID. Nagel was fiercely criticized for seemingly lending support to ID theories—as well as for ditching materialism (Ferguson 2013; Nagel 2012)—but he is not arguing for the inclusion of ID on the science curriculum. As he puts it, the individual who denies the notion that ID is science either “admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief that a designer is possible” (Nagel 2008, p. 195). If it is possible in principle, evolutionists can still argue that the evidence is overwhelmingly opposed to the actions of such a designer, but we cannot say “that someone who offers evidence on the other side is doing something of a fundamentally different kind. All [we] can say is that he is scientifically mistaken” (Nagel 2008, p. 195).

To be sure, Nagel understands that ID is far from being the ideal suitor to overthrow the evolutionary paradigm. He is not defending creationism’s explanatory credentials. We may still have very good reasons to keep creationism out of the classroom. An important strand in the contemporary philosophy of science agrees that methodological naturalism is untenable as a demarcation criterion, and hence it cannot ground the exclusion of non-naturalistic alternatives to Darwinism from the science curriculum (Boudry 2013; Fales 2013; Fishman 2007; Parsons 2005; Kitcher 2007). All of these authors agree that creationism deserves to be excluded from the science curriculum, but also that its eventual exclusion cannot depend on the fact that it suggests supernatural action. Instead, that exclusion can be easily grounded on its weakness as a proficient explanation for the origin of biodiversity. In this sense, creationism should not be singled out or treated as special just because it has a religious ring; it suffices to point out its explanatory weaknesses, which it shares with many other—secular—pseudosciences (Bellolio 2023). Creationism is thus kept out of the science curriculum in the same way as astrology, homeopathy, Lysenko’s pro-Soviet biology, or iridology, to name a few. The supernatural factor remains superfluous. Creationists are right in requiring epistemic fairness if that means that their theories should be assessed from an evidential perspective, but they cannot demand inclusion if their science is found horribly wanting again and again.

Crucially for this paper’s argument, however, this is not the same as stating that they are espousing bad religion. As theistic believers, they have every right to make factual claims, and eventually to put forward scientific arguments to support those claims. The fact that they turn out to be wrong does not make their incursion into the magisterium of factuality illegitimate. Like the New Atheists, creationists may have got many things wrong, but they got at least this one right.

6. Final Thoughts

In an article making sense of the New Atheist movement, or simply “militant modern atheism” as he calls it, Philip Kitcher (2011) distinguishes between the two main roles usually played by religion in the lives of the faithful. On the one hand, religion is about belief in certain doctrines. On the other, it is about moral and existential orientation. Dawkins et al. attacked religion tout court as if it were only of the first characteristic. This earned the movement fierce criticism, as it negligently ignored that religion is about orientation too. Surely for those committed to the orientation model— “a complex of psychological states that does not include factual beliefs, and that embodies a person’s sense of what is most significant and worthwhile in his own life and the lives of others” (Kitcher 2011, p. 4) —the claims of New Atheism are sterile, futile, and incomprehensible. However, what I have termed the epistemic objection that is specifically aimed at the belief model remains pertinent, insofar as these people believe that “they have grounds for thinking that the doctrines they espouse are true, and in this case the dispute between them and their critics turns on matters of evidence” (Kitcher 2011, p. 7). While the New Atheists are wrong in attacking the whole of religion as if it were only one model—that is, the one pertaining to belief—their critics are equally wrong in reducing religion to the orientation model.

This paper follows Kitcher’s argument by disaggregating the New Atheists’ claim into a normative and an epistemic objection against religion. While I have remained silent on the former, I have defended the structural frame of the latter. In this frame, religions—or better still, theistic traditions—make factual claims about the world as part of their overall quest for truth. In Dworkin’s nomenclature, religions have a science part, not in the sense that they use the scientific method to justify their faith, but in the sense that they pose “important factual questions” the answers to which determine, at least partially, the believers’ understanding of their faith and the place of humanity in the cosmos. Once within this domain of factual inquiry, contrary to Gould’s NOMA, some overlapping is reasonably expected between the efforts of science and religion, to the extent that both have vested interests in the explanation that emerges from the search. While theistic traditions can offer non-scientific arguments in this domain, they sometimes advance claims supposedly supported by evidence and research. Modern creationist theories are a prime example. While they might be utterly mistaken and pale in comparison to much better theories, such as evolution by means of natural selection, it is untenable to argue that creationists are cultivating an illegitimate version of their own religion just because they are interested in factual reality and further employ scientific rationality to (try to) prove their point. While some theologies have abdicated from any form of realism—such as Karl Barth’s followers who reject the view that the natural order can give us any meaningful insights into the glory of God—or have never held it to begin with, such as Buddhist “epistemic nonrealism” (Reichenbach 2010, p. 1039), the critics of the New Atheism are wrong in picturing religion tout court as Barthian or Buddhist.

In this sense, I have argued that while New Atheists and creationists have got many things wrong, they have got—at least—one thing right: religions cannot be divested from their legitimate factual concerns and, to that extent, they are participating in a domain of inquiry that relies on evidential methods for its resolution. If this resolution turns out to be unfavorable to long-standing religious claims, as the epistemic objection underscores, so be it.