"we are all atheists to a certain degree.

very few people suggest that we should go back to honoring and praying to zeus or thor. some of us just go one god further. "  richard dawkins gave a talk last week at gammage auditorium on ASU campus.  he focused primarily on his new book, the god delusion.  dawkins is incredibly eloquent in his speech and the lecture was powerful.  i felt, and i imagine much of the crowd felt (by the way... the largest crowd he has ever addressed according to him), a great sense of satisfaction to hear a well-educated and respected intellectual echoing the frustrations many of us experience when faced with abrahamic religious dogma.  he spent a small portion of the talk defending natural selection and pointing out the logical fallacy of intelligent design. 

THEORY A = natural selection (supported by loads of evidence; subject to peer review and scientific method)

THEORY B = intelligent design (faith based; problem of infinite regression - explaining a complex phenomenon with an ever more complex phenomenon)

The logical fallacy is as follows: THEORY A cannot explain problem X.  Therefore THEORY B must be the correct answer.

science does not claim to know everything.  in fact, skepticism is an essential part of the scientific method; a constant struggle to understand.  on that note, one cannot truly prove or disprove the existence of god.  even dawkins makes that caveat.  it is also impossible to disprove that a porcelain teapot is in orbit around jupiter, but most evidence suggests this is not the case. 

another somewhat controversial topic he addressed was the indoctrination of children.  a simple, poignant statement: "have you ever noticed the children always adopt the same religion as their parents and this just happens to be THE correct view of the world?"  he argues that religious dogma stifles the imagination and creativity and finds it absurd to ask children to make decisions about such large issues so early in life.  in the same way we do not call 1 year old ernie a socialist we should not call him a muslim or jew. 

sure, we impart countless things onto children: culture, customs, mores, norms, gender roles.  we can argue that science is just as much an institution as religion with its clearly defined conventions, procedures, and academic journals.  i feel that the process of science is up for debate and likely flawed in many respects.  however, science is unique in that the end results of this institution, no matter how flawed the process, are constrained by reality.  no matter how ideologically motivated a scientist may be, he or she cannot faith away gravity or any other laws that govern the cosmos.  the Bible is not subject to the same stipulations.  i just finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.  in Blue Mars, I found an excellent passage that speaks to this:

And all this vast articulated structure of a culture stood out in the open sun of day, accessible to anyone who wanted to join, who was willing and able to do the work; there were no secrets, there were no closed shops, and if every lab and every specialization had its politics, that was just politics; in the end politics could not materially affect the structure itself, the mathematical edifice of their understanding of the phenomenal world.  So Sax had always believed, and no analysis by social scientists, nor even the troubling experience of the Martian terraforming process, had ever caused him to waver in that belief.  Science was  a social construct, but it was also and most importantly its own space, conforming to reality only; that was its beauty.  Truth is beauty, as the poet had said, speaking of science.