I am collecting reviews of Faith versus Fact (sadly, there haven’t been many so far), and will eventually call attention to both the good ones and bad ones. I won’t try to refute the bad ones—I learned from Nick Cohen not to answer critics), but I think that if I highlight good ones, it’s only fair to call attention to the bad ones. But first let’s have a good one: Brother Jeffrey Tayler’s review in Saturday’s Atlantic, “Can religion and science coexist?” (free link).

Tayler is of course an atheist—and antitheist—which means that I have at least a chance of getting good marks. (I don’t expect to get a single good review from a theist.) And, fortunately, he liked the book and gave a pretty good summary of its contents. Tayler does note that the Pope has somewhat redeemed the Church with his global warming encyclical (which, he claims, lessens the force of my argument that religion makes at least a minor contribution to global-warming denialism), but Tayler neglects to mention that Pope Francis’s solution, which puts the burden on consumers rather than corporations—and totally exculpates population control—is evasive, impractical, and fails to deal with the damaging Catholic dogmas about contraception.

Tayler’s review makes two points that I want to elaborate on. First, he says this:

If there’s a subject Faith Versus Fact could have dealt with in more depth, it’s the question of how people, once shorn of faith, should perceive religion’s astonishing cultural heritage, from literature and music to art and architecture. He only briefly touches on art in the context of its unsuitability as a means of ascertaining truths about the objective world because, he writes, “it lacks the tools for such inquiry.” Works of art “can move us,” he writes, “even change us, but do they convey truth or knowledge?” But he does offer telling asides about his own reaction to such things, to demonstrate that he has a heart, and isn’t just a “cold scientist.”

I suppose the first bit makes a fair point, but I neglected the issue of religious art for two reasons. First, although the artistic heritage of religion is wide and rich, ranging from Leonardo’s paintings to Chartres to “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” I have NO IDEA whether, had religion never appeared, artists would have filled the lacuna with equally inspiring nonreligious works. There probably would have been no cathedrals, but art has been secular for a long time, and I find it hard to believe that medieval artists or later musicians wouldn’t have exercised their talents and impulses on secular topics, as did the early Dutch and Flemish painters like Frans Hals or Johannes Vermeer. I’d be interested to hear what readers think about this.

But the main reason I didn’t deal with this issue is that it was irrelevant, or largely irrelevant, to my theses: those involving the competing epistemologies of faith versus rationality in judging what’s true about the cosmos and the life within it. Just as I avoided passing judgment on whether religion has at times been good or bad for society, so I avoided speculating on whether art would have been better or worse without religion. Those issues, while intriguing, are hard to settle and, in truth, tangential to the aim of my book.

Tayler ends his review this way:

Faith Versus Fact could serve as a primer for nonbelievers wishing to present their case to the faithful as well as an aid for doubters struggling to resolve theistic dilemmas themselves. Atheists might hope that it could challenge believers by picking apart arguments for religion’s merits and veracity. But as his book demonstrates, and as the reactions to previous atheistic polemics by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens have proved, it’s unlikely to dissuade those whose faith is strongly grounded. Science might be based on a foundation of rational thought and trial-and-error, but the roots of religion lie in something much more incalculable, and thus much harder to counter.

Indeed, he’s right: hard-core religionists are hard to persuade (but not impossible, as Dawkins’s “Converts Corner” attests). And the arguments of faith, however, wonky, are recalcitrant to reason. But not impossible! Tayler himself writes weekly anti-theist columns for Salon that, of course, are even more “unlikely to dissuade those whose faith is strongly grounded.” But I suspect that both Tayler and I, as he implies above, are aiming at both the doubters and those who haven’t yet been brainwashed by believers.

And a nice tw**t from Tayler:

Tayler also told me that his review was the most active piece on the front page of the Atlantic, which surprised me. But, sure enough, as I write this on Sunday afternoon, there are already 1043 comments—and the piece was published just yesterday. I read down as far as the second comment (below) and stopped:

Dostoevsky was, of course, referring in The Brothers Karamazov to the notion that there can be no morality without God—a common view of the benighted. But whether Dostoevsky actually believed this himself is a matter of dispute.