[AWoodside]

[ QUOTE ]
God I love this guy.

[/ QUOTE ]

I thought almost everything he said was great. The only part I took issue with was his disdain for Richard Dawkins. It's interesting that he talked about how Dawkins is wrong about internally consistent scientists necessarily being atheists, and then casually mentions that he himself doesn't really believe in anything in the next question. I think Dawkins gets a bit of a bad rap from a lot of scientists that have been more or less conditioned to have knee-jerk PC reactions to these types of questions. I'm not a scientist myself but I did study physics for awhile at an institution of some repute, and I have quite a few friends who are scientists. I've never met a good scientist that wasn't for the most part an atheist in the Dawkin's sense of the word. Some were extremely compartmentalized and admitted to entertaining religion irrationally for purely aesthetic/personal psychological reasons, and some subscribed to a kind of vague and very weak deism. However, growing up in rural Oklahoma, pretty much the buckle of the bible belt, I have never ever ever met a competent scientist that was anywhere close to what I would consider a "religious person".

Whether or not Dawkins is hurting science by discouraging would-be scientists from entering the fray is an open question and I don't really have an opinion on that. I just think Dyson is wrong about how easy it is to be a good scientist and religious at the same time. If he probed the people he's referencing more deeply I think he'd find that they aren't really as religious as he things, or they're severely psychologically compartmentalized when it comes to their religious beliefs.