Check this Matt Nisbet post. Read it? Now my comments:

First, it’s fascinating how Nisbet approaches the issue of turning Galileo into a symbol of science/relgion harmony. For Nisbet, the problem here isn’t that the claim may be false, but that it might be a hard sell from a propaganda point of view. A surprising claim, only not surprising coming from Nisbet.

Beyond that, it’s a nice example of Nisbet promoting Carl Sagan and E. O. Wilson as great examples of harmonizers of science and religion. As I read the recent round of replies to vocal atheism, this claim sounds sillier and sillier. True, Sagan worked, and Wilson still works, hard to get the cooperation of religious believers. But today they’re some of the biggest demons of religious apologists, in both cases because of some rather obvious off-hand remarks. In Sagan’s case, exhibit A is mentioning that prayer doesn’t work in a discussion of superstition (a sensible example, if you aren’t thinking too hard about diplomacy). In Wilson’s case, this was finishing a book on animal behavior with a chapter pointing out that humans are animals too. In both cases, antagonizing believers was the last thing on their mind, they were just trying to do their jobs talking about the scientific method and animal behavior, respectively.

Sagan and Wilson are evidence that if we want to promote science-religion harmony, we don’t just have to avoid overt antagonism. We have to think carefully about every little obvious sub-point in our discussions of every aspect of human knowledge, and pretend to be oblivious about really obvious things if there’s some hard to assess change that some fundamentalist will see it as the mark of the beast. Not worth it.