A thread below has taken up Clifford Longleys column on the new atheists. A review in the December 4^th issue of the Times Literary Supplement, written by Michael Cobb (senior lecturer at the University of Manchester, author of a book on the French resistance to the Nazis), discusses two works, a thousand-page collective work entitled Evolution: The First Four Billion Years and a work one-quarter its size entitled 99% Ape: How Evolution Adds Up. This interesting review finds much to praise in the two works and some things to criticize, but at the end its tone suddenly becomes dismissive when discussing how many religious people oppose evolution. Here excerpts from the concluding paragraphs of the review, which I think confirm Longleys impressions:

While evolutionary biologists have always argued about the pace and causes of natural selection, and the precise shape of the coral of life, the very idea of evolution has been subject to a 150-year long offensive by a vast variety of religious thinkers. Both Evolution and 99% Ape deal with the thorny relation between evolution and religion, and both books disappoint, ceding ground where they should be at their most confident. In Evolution, David Livingstone points out that "religious believers have reacted in vastly different ways to evolution, and their stances do not follow any straightforward taxonomy of theological orientation". The key point, which explains why so many believers find evolution inimical, is that "opponents of Darwinism have been haunted by the spectre of materialism". What Livingstone fails to conclude is that although scientists, and indeed all those who want to understand how the universe works, can believe whatever fairy stories they wish, when an individual or a religion or a state uses religious belief as the measure by which facts are accepted or rejected, there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the theology and scientific knowledge. ...An exploration of the ideological similarities between fundamentalists of all stripes would have been invaluable; sadly, neither Scott nor Livingstone provides us with that. Worse, neither of them seems to realize that fundamentalist attitudes towards science are part and parcel of religion the irrational rejection of the facts of evolution flows from the irrational belief in the veracity of ancient, self-contradictory folk texts, and in the power of an imaginary supreme being.The authors of 99% Ape make clear their opposition to creationism of all stripes, too, but seem strangely reluctant to do battle on a favourable terrain. They quote various popes who argued that accepting evolution and believing in God are not contradictory, but they (like the popes) do not specify that this is only true if God is reduced to the role of a celestial clock-winder, who set the Universe running billions of years ago and then settled back to watch things unfold. In other words, it is only true if God is reduced to something that in practice is indistinguishable from a figment of imagination.