But how can science account for x?!

It really annoys me when people confuse atheism and science. Why on earth do they think that scientific theories are meant to do all the deus ex machina work that religion does. Each theory only explains facts within a certain domain e.g. Big-Bang theory answers certain questions of cosmology, Natural Selection explains how new species are formed and why some old species are extinct. But, naturally, to understand the whole world properly you need other non-theistic theories, like a good ethics.

So reading this bollocks by some theologian struck a nerve. I just had to reply:

Tom Frame may be professor of theology but he's no ethicist. He claims that "A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide." That's rubbish; any scientist who tried that (and a few have) would be committing a logical fallacy. As early as 1740 David Hume pointed out that we cannot draw morally prescriptive conclusions directly from what goes on in nature (the "is-ought" problem).

By publicly denouncing eugenics and genocide, Richard Dawkins is just following in a long line of evolutionary biologists - going back to T.H. Huxley and Charles Darwin himself - who have argued that our moral duty is to fight against "nature red in tooth and claw". Indeed, Darwin's scientific ideas partly stemmed from his recognition that human races are all one species and his strong opposition to slavery.

If Prof. Frame finds materialistic atheism unsatisfying by itself, he should try adding a little secular ethics. I think he'll find that atheist ethicists like David Hume, John Stuart Mill, G.E. Moore and Bernard Williams have a lot more to offer than Lennon's "Imagine" or angels at the bottom of the garden.

I know that they like bitchiness and it certainly helps get letters published but do you think the bit about "angels at the bottom of the garden" was too much?

(And I'll fess up here: Hume and Moore were not so much atheists as agnostics. But their ethical theories were a-theistic.)