Everyone’s linking to edge.com’s Annual Question for 2008, so I figure I might as well jump on the bandwagon. The question this year is “What have you changed your mind about [in 2007]? Why?” Of particular interest for godless liberals like myself is Clay Shirky’s answer:
Saying that the mental lives of a Francis Collins or a Freeman Dyson prove that religion and science are compatible is like saying that the sex lives of Bill Clinton or Ted Haggard prove that marriage and adultery are compatible. The people we need to watch out for in this part of the debate aren’t the fundamentalists, they’re the moderates, the ones who think that if religious belief is made metaphorical enough, incompatibility with science can be waved away. It can’t be, and we need to say so, especially to the people like me, before I changed my mind.