My point is not to claim that science has told us everything important about the world, that there are no longer any mysteries yet to be discovered, … - John Dupré

Empiricism provides the standard to which beliefs should answer. If we are capable of finding out what kind of world we live in, surely the best way of doing so is through our experience of it.

The main point, which would perhaps be unnecessary to labour if it were not so controversial and if it had not been denied in important respects by some quite unlikely people, is that the theory of evolution has been a major, even decisive, contributor to the process of undermining prescientific supernaturalistic metaphysical views and replacing them with the naturalistic metaphysics assumed by most contemporary philosophers. The question is not whether evolution and a particular religious tradition are logically consistent. Provided the religious tradition avoids factual claims, as Gould’s conception of distinct magisteria forces them to do by fiat and as sensible theologians have been increasingly willing to do for centuries, they are consistent because they do not speak on the same subjects. But it is nevertheless the case that science and religion speak for radically different conceptions of the universe. And as the conception fostered by the former has become more compelling, so that promoted by the latter has become less tenable. Science does not contradict religion; but it makes it increasingly improbable that religious discourse has any subject matter.

Religious difference, arguably, remains the most effective basis for defending boundaries between them and us, and the withering away of this kind of mythology would, I think, be entirely salutary. This is to say nothing of the thought that it may well be better for people to believe what is true.