Saw an ad for this in the new First Things: Keith Ward (see here) has written a response of sorts to the “new atheist” crowd. I imagine it’s the usual kind of irenic, thoughtful stuff Ward is known for.

I’ve often thought that the whole issue of whether “religion” is on the whole good or bad is a pretty muddled one. In addition to the probably insoluble matter of deciding what exactly counts as a religion, there’s no religion-less society to act as a control group in determing whether the influence of religion has been on the whole good or bad. And beyond that it’s very difficult to see how you would weigh the moral improvements against the moral defects that are arguably attibutable to a particular religion. Was the Inquisition worth the outlawing of infanticide? and so on. Plus there’s the issue of casuality: how do we know what’s attributable to religion? For instance, several scholars, including secular ones, have made the case that modern science arose in the West in part precisely because of the Christian worldview. The idea of a God who creates a universe that displays a rational order served as an impetus to discovering that order. But such a hypothesis hardly admits of definitive proof one way or the other.