I failed to address your other main charge. Putting "faith" in man made abstractions and scientific models, that is so often put forward by the religious (and t

I failed to address your other main charge. Putting "faith" in man made abstractions and scientific models, that is so often put forward by the religious (and the guy writing the nature article as well). Let's clarify beliefs first. There are two kinds of beliefs. One is based on evidence, logic, reason, testable repeatable experiments. Rational mind has no option but to accept their truthfulness (sometimes after laborious examination of evidence or step by step verification of logical deduction). You could go on and deny obvious truth, but that leads to cognitive dissonance and is rather mentally taxing. The other belief is opposite, it is not based on any evidence at all and it is called faith. You are believing things without having sufficient or any evidence for it. Note also that all religions are faith based. If they were based on evidence, religion would be a branch of science, it would be a scientific theory. Put another way, if you destroyed all holy books they would never be re-created again in their present form by future generations. But destroy all scientific knowledge and it will be re-created again. Why? Precisely because science is based on testing your ideas and models. This is why science is often discovered and re-discovered by independent people, living in completely different cultures. This is why science in China, or India is the same as science in USA or Argentina. It takes no faith to believe in Newton's laws. Who hasn't watched their physics professor use compressor to pump out air of two glass tubes and see feather and metal ball fall with equal speed, or seen the conservation of momentum demonstrated etc. Yes, it takes a lot of effort to test and devise experiments, but it is doable and many of us have done it for large sections of scientific knowledge. In fact, if it weren't possible to independently replicate an experiment and verify the results, then someone is doing poor science. It's simple as that. Contrast that with faith based beliefs. It all really boils down to you putting faith in other people who say there is a god, and not only that, they also know his mind, what he wants us to do. And people never ask for ordinary evidence from them for their extraordinary claims, they just accept it. And what brand of delusion of this kind you get indoctrinated into is highly correlated with where you were born. And isn't it also amazing that what ever religion you get indoctrinated into feels like the right one? :D. In fact, all discussions with the religious people always boil down to "evidence or shut up". The rest of discussion degenerates into psychology and dealing with fears of leaving various delusions.