Machines Like Us

In a recent letter to the editor of the scientific jounal, Nature, noted atheist and author Sam Harris writes to criticize the prestigious journal's compromising coverage of religious issues.

It was genuinely alarming to encounter Ziauddin Sardar's whitewash of Islam in the pages of your journal ('Beyond the troubled relationship' Nature 448, 131–133; 2007). Here, as elsewhere, Nature's coverage of religion has been unfailingly tactful -- to the point of obscurantism.

In his Commentary, Sardar seems to accept, at face value, the claim that Islam constitutes an "intrinsically rational world view." Perhaps there are occasions where public intellectuals must proclaim the teachings of Islam to be perfectly in harmony with scientific naturalism. But let us not do so, just yet, in the world's foremost scientific journal.

Read Mr. Harris' entire letter in Nature.