I’ve been meaning to post this for quite sometime.

When asked on The Innoculated Mind (Jan 25, 2007) in a conversation about how Science (and more specifically Evolutionary Biology) and Religion might fit together, P.Z. Myers had this to say:

“Well, gee. I believe that you can be a good scientist and you can practice Evolutionary Biology, and be religious, but I think you are doing it by compartmentalizing and setting aside critical thinking in certain aspects of your private life. And that’s perfectly okay. People do that all the time. Umm, but.. . but I think… I think the thing is that Science tends to erode religious belief because once you start seeing the value of the Scientific Method of thinking naturally about things that, uh, what happens is you start applying that to larger and larger chunks of your life, and if you do that you can’t go to church and sit there and listen to the minister without thinking… how do you know that? How did you determine that? And that… that ought to, uhh, completely gut any faith you might have.”

Interesting. Keep in mind these are not the words of some fundamentalist on a witch hunt, rather of a man who is deeply proud of his Atheism.