As its critics have already pointed out, there is an inherent contradiction in the new atheism, especially in its emphasis on the importance of “evidence” and the claim that science always proves its theories empirically. As Popper, Kuhn, and Polyani have argued, science itself has to rely on an act of faith. Even Monod acknowledged this. Dawkins’s hero Darwin admitted that he could not prove the evolutionary hypothesis but he had confidence in it nonetheless, and for decades, as we have seen, physicists were happy to have faith in Einstein’s theory of relativity, even though it had not been
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