I picked up a copy of Charles Taylor’s _The Secular Age_ because I heard it listed as an example of a response to Dawkins et al. I didn’t finish it, because it hardly responds to them at all, save for in one footnote (p. 835n):

Dawkins’ reasons for believing that science can sideline religion hardly inspire confidence. They draw heavily on an oversimple distinction between ‘faith’ and ‘science.’ ‘A case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.’ As for science, it ‘is free of the main vice of religion, which is faith.’ But to hold that there are no assumptions in a scientists’ work which aren’t already based on evidence is surely a reflection of blind faith, one that can’t even feel the occasional tremor of doubt.

Old argument, makes the mistake of thinking all assumptions are created equal. Next!

Aside from that, picking up the book made me think, “Oh, this is what it’s like for believers to read Dennett.” It starts with the assumptions that criticisms from religion are basically unsuccessful and moves on to sociological analysis of secularization, just as Dennett doesn’t take arguments for religion very seriously and then moves on to sociological analysis. There’s a place for a book like Taylor’s, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to read it in full. Something nice to point believers to when they don’t understand what Dennett was trying to do in _Breaking the Spell_.

The only other thing worth noting. This quote (p. 567):

…a crucial part of my argument for the ‘deconstruction’ of the death of God view, is that the arguments from natural science to Godlessness are not all that convincing…. Just as we laypeople take the latest report about the micro-constitution of the atom from the Sunday paper, so we may take it on authority from a Sagan or a Dawkins that Science has refuted God.

See that, Matt Nisbet? Sagan used as a standard example of an atheist. (BTW, I forgot to say this in my review of Berlinski, but he uses both Sagan’s _Cosmos_ and Wilson’s _Sociobiology_ as examples of evil atheist tracts, on pp. 51 and 165.