Very Telling

David Berlinski, a researcher at the Discovery Institute and advocate of Intelligent Design, has written a piece here regarding the apparently recent embrace on the part of the scientific community of atheism.  The whole article is worth a read.  The one thing that struck me the most was the following three short paragraphs:

It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism. The great physical scientists — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein — were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility.

The distinguished physicist Steven Weinberg has acknowledged that this is what the great scientists believed: But we know better, he has insisted, because we know more.

This prompts the obvious question: Just what have scientists learned that might persuade the rest of us that they know better? It is not, presumably, the chemistry of Boron salts that has done the heavy lifting.

In other words, the last 200 years have not yielded any particular revelations or epiphanies regarding the nature of the universe that have so completely devastated the need for a belief in God as to have provided modern scientists with "free pass" on that account.  He goes on to speculate and refute both Darwinism and quantum cosmology as sources of this "enlightenment", and does so handily.  Perhaps, when such theories are genuinely mature and proven, they might diminish the "God of the Gaps", but my God is greater than any gap and is only made to loom larger when the light is shined on the darkness.

(HT:  Instapundit, who also links to this rather incoherent and somewhat bad-faith response by the increasingly shrill Godless Math Nerd™ John Derbyshire