Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) by Jerry A. Coyne

there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then
is
our preaching vain, and your faith
is
also vain.”
    And this is echoed by modern religious scholars, including Richard Swinburne, one of the world’s most respected philosophers of religion:
    For the practices of the Christian religion (and of any other theistic religion) only have a point if there is a God—there is no point in worshipping a non-existent creator or asking him to do something on earth or take us to heaven if he does not exist; or trying to live our lives in accord with his will, if he has no will. If someone is trying to be rational in practicing the Christian (or Islamic or Jewish) religion, she needs to believe (to some degree) the creedal claims that underlie the practice.
    Mikael Stenmark, a professor of philosophy and religion at Uppsala University in Sweden, and dean of its Faculty of Theology, is even more explicit. (His book
Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life
was awarded a Templeton Prize in 1996 for “outstanding books in theology and the natural sciences.”)
    A religion therefore contains also (d)
beliefs about the constitution of reality. 
. . . According to the Christian faith, our problem is that although we have been created in the image of God we have sinned against God and the cure is that God, through Jesus Christ, provides forgiveness and restoration. But for this cure to work it appears that at least it must be true that God exists, that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that we are created in the image of God, that God is a creator, that God wants to forgive us, and that God loves us. Hence it seems as if Christianity, and not only science, has an
epistemic
goal, that is, it attempts to say something true about reality. If so, a religious practice like Christianity is meant to tell us something true about who God is, what God’s intentions are, what God has done, what God values, and how we fit in when it comes to these intentions, actions, and values.
    John Polkinghorne, an English physicist who left Cambridge to become an Anglican priest, later became president of Queens College, Cambridge, and wrote several dozen books on the relationship of science and religion. Polkinghorne too won a Templeton Prize, and emphasized the need for an empirical grounding of faith:
    The question of truth is as central to [religion’s] concern as it is in science. Religious belief can guide one in life or strengthen one at the approach of death, but unless it is actually true it can do neither of these things and so would amount to no more than an illusionary exercise in comforting fantasy.
    Ian Barbour, who died in 2013, was an American professor of religion (and another winner of the Templeton Prize) who specialized in the relationship between science and religion:
    A religious tradition is indeed a way of life and not a set of abstract ideas. But a way of life presupposes beliefs about the nature of reality and cannot be sustained if those beliefs are no longer credible.
    Finally, we have a joint statement by Francis Collins, a born-again Christian who directs the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and Karl Giberson, a Christian physicist. They were respectively once president and vice president of the accommodationist organization BioLogos:
    Likewise, religion in almost all of its manifestations is more than just a collection of value judgments and moral directives. Religion often makes claims about “the way things are.”
    Existence Claims: Is There a God?
    Some faith claims are more important than others, but nearly all theists have at least one or two bedrock beliefs that support their religion. The most important, of course, include the existence of a god, whether there is only one of them or, in polytheistic faiths like Hinduism, a panoply ofgods with different abilities. Existence claims about gods are clearly empirical claims—claims