Most of what we believe scientists think and feel about faith is wrong. That’s the argument Elaine Howard Ecklund makes in her new book, Science vs. Religion. Ecklund is the director of the program on religion and public life at the Institute for Urban Research at Rice University, and she focuses on science public policy at the school’s Baker Institute. From 2005 to 2008, she conducted the first systematic study of American scientists’ religious views, surveying 1,700 of them and interviewing 275 in depth.
As she told us earlier this year:

We already know that not all scientists are atheists, but I found that almost 50 percent identify with a religious label and about one in five is actively involved in a house of worship, attending services more than once a month. While many scientists are completely secular, my survey results show that top scientists are also sitting in the pews of our nation’s churches, temples, and mosques.

Indeed, only five (!) of the atheist or agnostic scientists I had in-depth conversations with were actively working against religion. I discovered many atheist or agnostic scientists who think that key mysteries about the world can be best understood spiritually. Others attend places of worship, completely comfortable with religion as moral training for their children and an alternative form of community.

Ecklund’s book has already gotten praise from Ron Numbers, the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, and Francisco Ayala.

Sam Harris took to his Twitter to announce his forthcoming book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, scheduled to hit the bookshelves in October. Jerry Coyne has tracked down a description:

Harris proposes that answers to questions of human value can be visualized on a “moral landscape”—a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks and valleys correspond to states of greater or lesser well being in conscious creatures like ourselves. Different ways of thinking and behaving—different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc.—translate into movements across this landscape. Such changes can be analyzed objectively on many levels—ranging from biochemistry to economics—but they have their crucial realization as states and capacities of the human brain.

Journalist Ian Monroe has created a new version of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species with all the words that do not appear in the King James Bible (33,000 of them) blacked out. The purpose, he explains in a statement:

I wanted people to reflect on the nature of language, and particularly on fundamentalism, and the notion of ‘the Bible said it, I believe it, that settles it,’ which seems to preclude most concepts in a modern worldview. I also thought it would be pretty funny to actually see what it would look like if you could visually remove all those modern concepts.

On his blog The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan writes:

Since our online dialogue a couple of years ago, Sam and I have become good friends, and we are planning to turn our conversation into a little print on demand book, with some contributions from other atheists and believers. If you’d like to get on an email list so that when we manage to put this all together, we can notify you and tell you how you can get a copy—for your own or, we hope, teaching use or a basis for discussion groups—send an email to samandandrewdialogue@gmail.com. I’m a bit swamped right now but we hope to get this done soon.
We are going to donate all proceeds to St Jude’s Children Research Center.
This is about trying to restore a civil conversation between serious people of faith and sincere non-believers, to try and defuse and depolarize this debate some more.