religion and/vs science.

With prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens taking center stage, I feel there is no room for believers or even agnostics in the science community. Being religious shouldn't take away from your credibility as a scientist (or even just a rational person) but campaigns by politicians flaunting religion as their reason for being anti-whatever are not helping. (Anyone think it's interesting how politicians play up their religious views while scientists seldom discuss theirs?)

And sometimes the sky isn't blue.

Here's something I read years ago I keep coming back to: Eric Cornell in his letter to Time "What Was God Thinking? Science Can't Tell".

"Why is the sky blue?" I offer two answers: 1) The sky is blue because of the wavelength dependence of Rayleigh scattering; 2) The sky is blue because blue is the color God wants it to be.

The religious explanation has been supplemented- but not supplanted- by advances in scientific knowledge. We now may, if we care to, think of Rayleigh scattering as the method God has chosen to implement his color scheme. 

Stick with the plainest truth: science says nothing about intelligent design, and intelligent design brings nothing to science, and should be taught in theology, not science classes. 

How beautiful is this? Science and religion do not have to clash but rather co-exist (ha), with religion answering the "why's" to science's "how's"... if I choose not to take religion at face value.

Can I pick and choose what I will accept about my religion? (There is a term for this!- cafeteria Catholicism, so clever.) Take evolutionary vestiges, the appendix, the backward eyes, humans' bipedalism, "junk DNA"... or maybe we're acting on incomplete knowledge? How will we ever know everything?

In "god is not Great: how religion poisons everything", Christopher Hitchens addresses the argument that religion consoles our awareness of the unknown, by suggesting we can appreciate the unknown without religion explaining this void.

...the most educated person in the world now has to admit... he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.

If the universe was found to be finite or infinite, either discovery would be equally stupefying and impenetrable to me.

Once we know everything in the world there is to know, will we may be fazed by nothing? But we discover that knowing more only adds to our amazement about the world.