actually what is pathetic is the attempt to pose science as something diametrically opposed to religion, which is of course the party line of the new atheists.
What's a "new atheist"? How does a new atheist differ from an old atheist? (I'm not up to speed on Sciforum jargon.) It seems to me that there have been militant atheists for generations, there have been quiet atheists, philosophically astute atheists, ignorant atheists... nothing that I can see has changed very much recently.
As for science being opposed to religion, it depends. Here's my idea of how the history of science and religion went down:
In earlier medieval times Platonism was pretty prevalent. Our physical world was imagined as if it was a shadow, a projection of divine events. So events here on this plane often seemed to possess a symbolic quality, being revelations of higher intentions. That resulted in a traditional world where the miraculous wasn't unusual or unexpected. People's interests weren't in the regularities of nature so much as in the extraordinary and uncanny.
But the 13'th century spread of this-worldly Aristotelianism, the 14'th century Ockhamist revival of nominalism, and crucially, the 16'th century Protestant reformation changed all that. The gap between the creator and his creation received new emphasis. It was unbridgeable, except by Christ's incarnation and (of course) by the Bible. So the Protestants laughed uproariously at all of the Catholic saints, miracles and relics, and sneered at age-old village folk beliefs. The Protestant solution was to teach people to read and get Bibles into their hands.
And the prevailing worldview changed, the physical universe had become 'creation', running like a clockwork on its original impetus, in accordance with laws that God had originally set down at creation. The 17'th century scientific revolution set out to discover those laws of creation and within the space of a single century found themselves successful far beyond their wildest hopes. And so far, science hadn't directly challenged the religious edifice, at least in its new and less-luxuriant renaissance-era form. Some of the early scientists actually felt as if they were reading the mind of God.
But something else was happening in the 17'th century. Religious free-thinkers were appearing who asked the inevitable question -- if everyone is supposed to dismiss the 'as above, so below' symbolism and all of the ever-present miracles of medieval Catholicism as ignorant, credulous and false, then why in the world should the Protestants' own beloved Bible be treated any differently?
So not only did we see the beginnings of the higher-critical study of the Bible, we also saw a new skepticism about all revealed religion spreading out among the European intellectual classes, a tendency that came to be called 'deism'. In 1648 Europe was exhaused and filled with revulsion at the religious enthusiasms that had fueled the wars of religion. The upshot was that all purported divine revelations were increasingly treated with skepticism. The idea started to take hold that nobody really had the definitive answers and that religious adherence should be a matter of personal conscience, not state compulsion. We see these ideas being expressed by some of the American founders.
But the deists weren't atheists exactly. While they were skeptical about revealed theology, they still accepted natural theology. They were especially impressed by the design argument. They just didn't see any natural way that biological organisms could have become so well adapted to their particular environments without a creative hand that had originally designed them that way. So we have the popular picture of the deist deus abscoditus, the supernatural being who had originally created everything and then took off for regions unknown, with no continuing role in his mechanical clock-work creation.
A century later and we are in the 19'th century with Darwin, Wallace, T.H. Huxley and natural selection. Science suddenly produced a persuasive and broadly convincing explanation for the mystery that had always been natural theology's strongest argument. In so doing science came into direct collision with what many people believed was the rock solid heart of religious belief, the total obviousness of God's creation and man's place in it. Even the skeptical deists hadn't touched that.
That's where contemporary atheism was born out of deism and where the contemporary science-religion death-struggle really got its start. It's why today's fundamentalists spit out the name 'Darwin' with even more vehemence than 'Satan'.
It's generated all kinds of reactions, not only a revival of traditional Christian fundamentalist/Biblicist religiosity with its monkey-trials, but also from more romantic philosophical corners whose 19'th century theories of absolute idealism were intended to put science back into its proper place, subordinate to spirit. Today, the philosophy of mind has perhaps become supernaturalism's last respectable intellectual redoubt, with qualia theories and such things hoping to demonstrate that human subjectivity is fundamentally inexplicable from the point of view of physicalistic science.
