Touched off by Jacob Weisberg's recent article in Slate (Evolution vs. Religion: Quit Pretending They're Compatible), there has been quite a bit of discussion of the issue of evolution vs. religion. The post that seems to get all the most important links together in one place seems to be at Telic Thoughts. The discussion includes comments by Julian Sanchez, Timothy Sandefur, and PZ Myers. I don't have much to say about it beyond these two points:
(1) Many of the people discussing the matter are rather obviously muddling together religious belief and religious argument; in particular, they are saying things about particular religious beliefs that can only apply to particular religious arguments. The issue is an important one because one can have multiple arguments, even multiple types of arguments, for any given belief; if a discovery makes a particular argument impossible, it doesn't necessarily affect the belief at all. This point is all the more relevant given that there is no single design argument. I think Darwin has a nice letter (I forget to whom, but it can be found in Francis Darwin's collection of Darwin's writings on religion) in which he recognizes that there are at least three types of biologically relevant design arguments, and that his discovery doesn't impact them all in the same way. He thinks, rightly, that it blocks design arguments of the straightforward sort usually associated with Paley. Darwin, who unlike some of his successors actually knew something of the matter, recognized that this was the only design argument that his discovery made impossible; for others additional considerations like the problem of evil would have to be brought into play.
(2) The comments on religion made by some of the people in the discussion does more to show that they have taken no trouble actually to research the matter before spouting off about it than anything else. Fair enough in the blogosphere; but if you don't at least know something about what distinguishes general concourse (concursus), conservation, and extraordinary intervention, you should at least recognize that you don't know enough to be doing anything more than merely guessing.
