If a grown adult fervently believes in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus then he or she would rightly be perceived as mad, ignorant or both by most people. Yet the belief in an invisible man in the sky who will torture you for eternity if you don't 'believe' in him is somehow afforded protection from such ridicule. Indeed, I would argue that belief in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus is more rational than belief in any of the major world religions because, at least to the unsuspecting child, both the tooth fairy and Santa leave evidence that they have actually been to your house and left money or presents.

I have a friend who is a Muslim. He is by no means a tee-totaler and I've never seen him pray, but get him started on the subject of religious belief and atheism and there is literally no stopping him as he talks and even shouts over any arguments against religious belief. On one occasion I was talking to my Muslim friend(N_) and another friend of mine(P_) who, through more than one family tragedy, despises religion more than I ever could. Somehow, regrettably, the subject of conversation came round to religious belief and atheism. N_ and P_ got more and more heated as they laid into each other, P_ eventually backed down because more and more onlookers were looking on (this was at a wedding after all). N_ was very pleased with himself for having shouted the loudest and longest. What stung me most was his assertion that scientists were arrogant because they presumed to know everything about the Universe. As far as I am concerned, the unfounded belief that all the answers to the biggest questions in this life lie between the pages of one book (and try to get religionists to agree on which book) is the height of arrogance.

Science does not claim to have all the answers, it is merely our current best explanation for how we think the universe works using the tools of logic and reason. Our scientific understanding of the universe is ever-changing (dare I say, evolving) as we accumulate more and more empirical evidence. People put forth theories that explain our current evidence, predictions are then made from these theories and then evidence to support these predictions is sought. If no evidence is found, or if the evidence indicates that the theory is wrong, the theory is adapted to accommodate the new evidence, or it is thrown out to be replaced by an alternative theory. Science evolves by people challenging the current paradigm and finding evidence to change it.

Most religions say the opposite. They state that the answers are revealed to us by gods and angels and we are to believe, without question, the answers that we are given. This is Dogma, unquestioning belief in revealed 'facts'. God gave you a brain, but obviously he didn't intend for you to use it. The world-view of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) probably made sense to the bronze-age goat-herders who first made it all up, but in todays world, where we know the world is not flat, the stars are not holes in the sky where the rain comes in, that life is billions of years old and the Universe itself is billions of years older still - frankly it's embarrassing.

Back to the diagram. In a nutshell - Christian dogma during the Dark ages in Europe effectively stifled scientific inquiry for over a thousand years. Perhaps the greatest 'sin' carried out by the church was the ban on the dissection of cadavers that held back medicine and biology for a millenium. The power of the church even led to a regression in our scientific understanding of the world and in our use of technology. It was only with the coming of the enlightenment and the rediscovery of 'heretical' Greek and Roman texts that Europeans could claim they had surpassed the Roman's, who's civilisation had collapsed a thousand years previously.