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In this intriguing but frustrating book, Jon Mills tries to do three things. However, Mills, like so many new atheists, misunderstands the issue of scientific meaning, in stating that "[t]he God question is not a legitimate scientific topic because it does not meet the basic requisite of falsifiability through testability." Mills struggles to uphold a standard something like this, but in the end the need to falsify religion wins the day, as exemplified by the following statement: "There is no evidentiary or verifiable proof for believing that God is anything but an idea" (p. 75). [Extracted from the article]

Highlights from the article: Response to critics: how religious beliefs distort historical understanding: Yves Gingras: Science and religion: an impossible dialogue. It is surprising to see that despite the flood of papers and books on the importance of a fruitful "dialogue" between science and religion, one is hard pressed to find any clear definition of the term "dialogue" or what could be the effects of such dialogues on the content of science. Interestingly, in his review of the book, Maurice Clavelin noted that the book "is not hostile to religion as a personal commitment, nor does it rely on a caricature of science", since I recognize that science "in turn depends on a number of postulates - metaphysical, ethical and methodological" (Clavelin [5], 121). For it is one thing to defend the autonomy of science over theology (as many natural philosophers and scientists did over the centuries) and a different thing altogether to say that science can be I useful i to religion.

A review of the book "Hope: A User's Manual," by MaryAnn McKibben Dana, is presented.

John Dryden's Religio Laici (1682) was situated at the center of debates over religious toleration in Restoration England. With this poem and its preface, Dryden took up the question of how to represent—how to give poetic voice to—forbearance in a world of contentious religious belief. His answer was to orchestrate the distinctive styles of Restoration spirituality—deist and dissenter, papist and latitudinarian—by passing his voice through each position and, with an apparent concession of poetic style, to bring his performance to rest within the central tolerationist argument: liberty of tender conscience. Writing different voices, and often with an intent to abuse, may unsettle toleration's claims of quiet forbearance with a clamor of conflict and argument, but the tension that Dryden creates between and among voices engages his readers and draws them through the styles of spirituality and into the space, the very experience of early modern toleration. Perhaps, too, Religio Laici helps us better to understand how to represent and perform what we now call tolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]