The new atheists, claiming the authority of science, go on about the old man with a white beard seated on a cloud, or they chuckle and scold at the thought of an imaginary friend. The response among the pious has been in some cases to put Adam on a dinosaur, proposing a science of their own. There is little to choose between the two. In both cases there is a radical rejection of the language of the sublime, that is, of the divine. In neither case is there any conception of the beautiful. Say what one will about religion through the millennia, it has yielded a great bounty of art in every kind.
