As should be apparent from reading his review of Dan Dennett's book, Breaking the Spell, physicist, Freeman Dyson is no naturalist. However, his review of Dennett's book is a lot more intelligent and thoughtful than was Leon Wiseltier's earlier review in the pages of the New York Times Book Review.

It is my opinion that Dyson should be a music critic; aside from a brief description of Dennet's book, most of the review consists of a verbous concoction of opinions and trivial quotations whose relationship to the book is tenuous at best. His criticism can be sumarized as follows: the study of religion as a natural phenomenon makes me uncomfortable, because it vilifies all the beautiful art and poetry that was produced because of it. Not to mention that my momma knows best, and she said that humans cannot do without religion even if they try. I know many religious folks, and they are very charitable people...
I think Dyson's discourse would not be out of place in a conversation over tea and cookies with aunt Louise but has no intellectual relevance. It does not proof or disproof anything; it just muddy the waters.
Science IS the the only way to discuss anything in a productive way; some kind of logic must be the discriminant factor and you cannot argue with this fact. I really do not see what merit has poetry in this discussion.
But what makes me really, really nervous is the rap about 9-11. If Dyson was an honest intellectual, he would certainly not put the terrorism card on the table while reasoning about religion. It is ever more clear that 9-11 and religious fanaticism have an indirect relationship which has been exploited for political reasons. Analyzing the intellectual background of the hijackers to prove anything is useless at best, because we do not really know who the hijackers really were- or are, since it seems that many of them are still alive- and we do not know their motivs. We do not really know enough about 9-11, and what we do know about it points to the fact that religion was certainly not the driving force that made it happen. Just like for the Crusades, religion was a mere accessory to a political and economical enterprise. So, please let us not use the little we know about 9-11 to prove anything about religious extremism.