Sensing the need for a break from the rigorous philosophical demands of Emergence, semantic plasticity and clichéd innuendos, I retreated into some light reading of ID, black holes, singularities, the Standard Model, bosons, fermions (both quarks and leptons), hadrons, fields, forces and symmetries.

Some of you may remember Shane Magee, thinker, theologian and giggling sidekick to the pastor without raiment. I've watched with the patience of Job for the next installment of FakeNaked which was to deal with hermeneutics. But here instead he speaks softly about William Haley, Richard Dawkins, his god, and education.

As something of a counterweight I also read Berlinski.

David Berlinski got his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton and was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. He has written in the fields of analytic philosophy, differential topology, the philosophy of mathematics, systems analysis, and theoretical biology. He's taught at the City University of New York, Rutgers, Stanford, and the Universite de Paris.

Berlinski claims to be an atheist.

I can't speak to Magee's qualifications, if any qualifications there be. I think you will find his lecture instructive in a most perverse way.

Magee claims to be a Christian.

Berlinski discusses the following questions with some sense of humor and irony:

Has anyone provided a proof of God's inexistence?
Not even close.

Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here?
Not even close.

Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life?
Not even close.

Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought?
Close enough.

Has rationalism in moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral?
Not close enough.

Has secularism in the terrible twentieth century been a force for good?
Not even close to being close.

Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences?
Close enough.

Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational?
Not even ballpark.

Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt?
Dead on.