It is very rare in the newspaper that there is meaningful coverage of religion. And when I say "the newspaper," I mean the New York Times (I find it's more accurate to classify the Post and Daily News under "entertainment"). I don't know whether the Times' liberal editorial board has decided, of late, that religion's not worth covering, or what--but overall, their coverage of religion and its importance is utterly lame.

But, as my grandfather used to say, even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut.

A few weeks ago, one of the Times' contributing editorialists, philosopher Stanley Fish, wrote an article titled "God Talk." If you read anything related to religion this year, read this essay. Fish, reviewing a recent book by the philosopher Terry Eagleton, addresses a basic question that concerns every one of us: why does religion still matter in today's society, even after science has "proven" that many traditional religious doctrines are implausible?

The answer, according to Fish and Eagleton, lies not in pitting science against religion (as we've been doing for, oh, the last 500 or so years), but in showing that science and religion are both ways of thinking that are based on faith. That's right—science is a system of faith, just like religion. The philosophical subject here is the field of "epistemology," or "how we know what we know." Contemporary epistemology recognizes that all knowledge is partial—to know anything about the world, we begin not from a "firm foundation" of "absolute truth," but we place every kernel of knowledge on a foundation of faith. Some things—whether the physical structure of the universe and what makes it work, or the actions of a loving, creating God—we don't really understand, so we accept them on faith.

All of us have been raised up to believe that science was somehow "true." What we were never taught and shown is how all truth is conditioned on certain premises that we accept on faith. This is what Fish's article (and Eagleton's book) are showing us.

Does this make any sense? I hope so. I know a lot of you have to defend yourselves against your friends and co-workers who tell you (sometimes openly, sometimes in backhanded ways) that they think that your church-going and belief are foolish. I would just respond to them that they're probably operating in an old-fashioned epistemological world and that they need to get with it!

The new world says that religion and science are not opposed. The "battle" between science and religion is over. Both lost. Both fail to fully describe the universe we live in! But both still have a critical role to play in our lives. Science and religion are different systems of belief, based on different premises, each taken on faith. And they both have different goals that are critical to our human existence: science to tell us "how?" and religion to tell us "why?"!

I hope you enjoy Fish's article and the follow-up and the reader comments. For me, it's the most important piece of religious writing I've read all year. And finally, remember: don't kill yourself trying to understand all this stuff—I'm really, really nerdy.