giving religion its due

David Sloan Wilson is one of the most brilliant evolutionary scholars around. An atheist himself, he has a great respect for the role of religion in human society. He works with religious communities to see what they can learn from evolutionism and vice versa. This seems to be a more fruitful approach to spreading the Darwinist word than that taken by Dawkins et al. Here's an extract from a fascinating interview with DSW:

I piss off atheists more than any other category, and I am an atheist. One of the things that infuriates me about the newest crop of angry atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, is their denial of the beneficial aspects of religion. Their beef is not just that there is no evidence for God. They also insist that religion "poisons everything", as Christopher Hitchens subtitled his book. They are ignoring the scientific theory and evidence for the "secular utility" of religion, as Émile Durkheim put it, even though they wrap themselves in the mantle of science and rationality. Someone needs to call them out on that, and that person is me.