One letter-writer, by the way, referred to "Natalie Angier's reputation as a careful and fair science reporter" before taking issue with her views. Careful and fair she may be, but I saw no evidence of it here. I did, however, notice that her last name very nearly spells "angrier." This seems appropriate, as the tenor of her remarks suggests a deeply angry person.

In her extended reply to her critics, she begins by contrasting science, "an analytical and evidence-based understanding of the natural world," with religion, which is "founded on opinion, tradition, fear, and the annual sing-along of Handel's Messiah." Notice that ethical convictions, love for one's fellows, and other high-minded purposes apparently play no part in the founding of religion. (Nor do they appear to play any role in "analytical and evidence-based" science, leaving us, presumably, in a moral vacuum.) Note also the demeaning reference to "the annual sing-along." It does not occur to Ms. Angier that religion provides more than an impetus to the singing of the Messiah; it also provided Handel with the inspiration to write it - and that a body of belief that can midwife such music may not be entirely without merit.

Ms. Angier is too caught up in sarcastic denunciations to reflect on fine points. She moves breezily into a mini-diatribe against the "barmy claims of conventional religions -- that a corpse named Lazarus, left to saute for four days in the less than cryogenic conditions of Bethany, circa 30 A.D., can nevertheless be resurrected to pink and voluble good health; or that a virgin can become pregnant without so much as a single bout of heavy petting with 'the Father...'"

Although Ms. Angier speaks of religions, plural, the examples she gives are confined to only one religion, Christianity, and, as you can see, are couched in deliberately offensive language. The intent is ostensibly to shock the reader with crude jokes -- "saute" -- and cruder imagery -- "heavy petting." There's not much difference between this sort of thing and an angry, alienated teenager spray-painting profanities on a wall. The teenager wants attention; he wants to shock the community and earn a reputation as a rebel; paradoxically he also wants respect from the community for his boldness and iconoclasm. He is not really making an argument with his spray can -- he's just hoping to get a reaction from the appalled, but secretly admiring, authority figures in his life. Many kids go through a rebellious phase. Most adults outgrow it. And those who don't? We will return to this question.

In the meantime, Ms. Angier has moved on to denouncing "the irrational, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific blindset that is fast becoming the most salient quirk of the United States." Here is a position that can be respected for its clarity, if for nothing else. Those who disagree with Ms. Angier do not merely hold a differing worldview -- rather, they hold no creditable view at all. Theirs is not a mindset but a "blindset," to use Ms. Angier's snide neologism. If religious believers are "irrational," then most of the great thinkers of Western history were irrational. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Maimonides, Aquinas, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and Kant all believed in the divine, as did most of the world's great painters, sculptors, composers, and writers. Were Tolstoy and Dostoevski "anti-intellectual"? Were Isaac Newton and Roger Bacon "anti-scientific"? For that matter, does it make any sense to characterize the United States in this fashion, when this country remains the leading scientific and technological innovator in the world?

Not troubling to consider these or other objections, Ms. Angier plows ahead. Generously she allows that it is permissible to regard "the Bible as a cultural, historical, and literary work," adding that "[w]hatever allegorical truths or insights into human nature the Bible holds may be worth exploring..." Note the coy word "may." She's not willing to concede that the Bible actually holds any valid truths or insights, only that such a possibility cannot be ruled out. But her main concern is to limit any such truths or insights that "may" exist to the realm of the allegorical. What she wants is an "enlightened, post-literal interpretation of Bible," but what she finds instead is that "a huge proportion of the population" -- irrational, anti-intellectual, and anti-scientific, one must assume -- "claims to believe in heaven, the resurrection, angels, miracles, and the horoscope page..."

The phrasing "claims to believe" is another tic of sarcasm; Ms. Angier can't even bring herself to grant that people may be sincere in their mistaken beliefs. The beliefs in question are diverse, although Ms. Angier lumps them together in a manner reminiscent of the subtitle of James Randi's debunking book Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions. In the subtitle we have psychics and ESP bundled up with unicorns, the whole package conveniently labeled "Delusions." In Ms. Angier's list, we have "heaven, the resurrection, angels, miracles, and the horoscope page." Let's take these one at a time.

For heaven, i.e., an afterlife, there is a great deal of empirical evidence, ranging from near-death experiences to deathbed visions, from mediumistic communications to anecdotal, but not uncommon, instances in which the bereaved feel they have been contacted by departed loved ones. Thousands of cases of all these types have been documented; thousands more are reported informally. All of this evidence can be disputed, though some of it seems strong enough to withstand even the most concerted scrutiny. In any event, a belief in heaven or an afterlife is no more arbitrary or irrational then a belief in any other proposition for which there exists strong but not conclusive evidence.

The resurrection of Jesus is a different matter, a one-time event not subject to empirical testing today. I'm not a member of any Christian church, but I have read arguments both for and against the historicity of the resurrection, and I am personally of the view that something highly remarkable happened on that first Easter, something powerfully transformative that turned scattered and demoralized apostles into zealous missionaries willing to undergo torture and death in the name of what they had seen. Other viewpoints are, of course, possible, and in such a sensitive matter, all positions should be treated with respect. Ms. Angier prefers to use ridicule.

Angels and miracles are the third and fourth items. In non-technical usage, "angels" can be said to be any spiritual beings, including one's departed friends or relatives. Thus the evidence for life after death is again relevant. As for miracles, only the most entrenched skeptic can deny that they happen at least occasionally. Thousands of accounts of spontaneous healings, astonishing synchronicities (meaningful coincidences), and supernatural signs have been reported. Are they all false? The very existence of the cosmos is a miracle of sophisticated fine-tuning, in which the properties of different elements, subatomic particles, and natural forces are perfectly balanced to ensure a stable, habitable environment. Life itself is a miracle; the simplest one-celled organism is vastly more complex than any factory ever built, and can make a perfect copy of itself; the information encoded in its genes would fill many bookshelves -- yet the first such organism arose, we are told, spontaneously. Is that not a miracle?

And finally there is "the horoscope page," dragged in like the unicorn in Randi's subtitle to provide the list with a mordantly jocular conclusion. I have nothing to say in defense of horoscopes. Few religious believers defend them. They are as irrelevant to this subject as are Mr. Randi's unicorns to pyschics and ESP.

In response to a critical letter, Ms. Angier writes, "Huston Smith [a noted authority on religion] cites a few of the good things that religious people have done in the past. Yet if we were to set that list up against the atrocities committed in the name of INSERT PREFERRED DEITY HERE, which would be longer?" More cute wordplay, disguising an apparently bottomless ignorance of history. Having previously shown herself unaware of the long list of scientists, artists, and philosophers who believed in God, Ms. Angier now demonstrates that she is unaware of the broader cultural ramifications of religious faith. She evidently means to haul out the old, mildewed claim that all the good done by, say, Christianity (her favorite whipping boy) cannot match the evil of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the witchhunts. This argument has been repeated so often that many people believe it to be true; but it is not true.

The pre-Christian world was an infinitely poorer place to live than the Christian world that replaced it -- poorer in its abysmal treatment of children, its casual infanticide, its brutal slave trafficking, and its denial of basic rights to women, minors, foreigners, and just about everyone else outside a narrow, privileged class of freeborn adult males who enjoyed full citizenship. In the pagan world, the famed Roman roads were lined with crucified prisoners, and the emperor Nero set living Christians ablaze as human torches to light his elegant soirees. There was no concept of the value of an individual human life, nor any notion of an inextinguishable, immortal soul.

Ms. Angier points to "the evidence from game theory research" to assert that "cooperative behavior can be a stable and naturally salubrious strategy, without the slightest need for a religious storyboard." In other words, ethics doesn't depend on God. But game theory did not produce a "naturally salubrious strategy" for Nero's martys, or the slaves in the salt mines, or the slaves in the galleys, or the newborns left to die of exposure, or the women who were robbed of their property and left penniless by a social system that did not recognize human rights and a prevailing ethos that equated kindness with weakness.

Nor did game theory prod the pagans into the formulation of science as a discipline, a historical development that took place only after the myriad pagan dieties, with their conflicting powers and jurisdictions, were replaced by the concept of a single, logically consistent God. Monotheistic religion, far from being anti-scientific, laid the groundwork for a truly scientific approach to nature, a fact reflected in the religious convictions of nearly all prominent scientists prior to the mid-1800s.

Ms. Angier's most specific criticism of religion involves terrorism. "[T[hese days, with holy wars threatening to swallow us all in one great, ecumenical gulp, religion's assets column is beginning to look an awful lot like Enron's." While the destruction caused by terrorism may be "ecumenical," in the sense that its victims are a cross-section of the world's faiths, the terrorist movement itself is associated with one and only one religion, Islam, and primarily with Islam's most militant sect, Wahabbism. But if all religions are to take the blame for militant Islam's tactics, then surely all secular movements should share equally in the blame for Stalin's genocidal atrocities, or for Mao's Cultural Revolution, or Pol Pot's "killing fields," or Castro's imprisonment of human rights activists. If it is unfair to blame secularism for all the ills of its most fanatical adherents, isn't it equally unfair to tar religion, as such, with the crimes of al Qaeda?

Perhaps realizing that one-liners, name-calling, and guilt by association have not been sufficient to clinch her argument, Ms. Angier invokes Occam's Razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is to be preferred, to assert that "the god option is one entity too many to explain reality." Evidently she feels she can "explain reality" without recourse to "the god option." Yet of course none of us can "explain reality" in any comprehensive way, either with or without God. To explain all of reality would be to understand the cause of everything that exists, an understanding far beyond the powers of the human mind. The mind is at a loss even to explain its own existence, much less the entirety of the world around it. In the absence of any comprehensive explanation of things, Ms. Angier does not know if "the god option" will ultimately prove necessary or not. She is entitled to presume it unnecessary, if she likes. But why heap opprobrium and ridicule on those who take a contrary view?

She closes her argument with a few obligatory words about how an atheist can find meaning in life. Here she drops sarcasm in an attempt at soaring rhetoric, but note that she must use the vocabulary of religion to make her words fly: "If we... are capable of understanding to universe as it really is, then that understanding is our mission, our privilege, our sacred duty, if you will." Our mission? Our sacred duty? The ironical addition of the words "if you will" does not change the fact that Ms. Angier has just engaged in an extended, vituperative attack on the concept of the sacred. Having burned that bridge, she is not entitled to cross it now.

And why exactly, in a godless cosmos, do we humans have any mission or duty to do anything? We are, in Ms. Angier's conception, bits of randomly assembled flotsam, whose nervous systems rather magically give rise to the epiphenomenon of consciousness. We have no guide to ethics except game theory, and no point or purpose to our lives beyond that which we choose to invent. We have the capacity to understand some aspects of the world around us; we also have the capacity to immerse babies in vats of boiling lead, or shoot up heroin and put ourselves in a coma, or lay waste to the planet with nuclear bombs. Why is it our mission and sacred duty to exercise the first capacity, and none of the others? Is it because we owe it to humanity to use our talents constructively? Who says so? Where is it written? And why should we obey?

Ms. Angier, in her zeal to show how rich and meaningful a religion-free life can be, has borrowed more than the word "sacred." She's borrowed the very concept of our shared obligation to humanity that is at the heart of religion. To take a moral stance, she must adopt religion in the very act of spurning it. In doing so, she comes perilously close to establishing religion as axiomatic to morality.

She doesn't see this, though. Call it her "blindset." And call it something more -- the shout of the ego, which drowns out so much else.

Religion teaches the taming of the ego. It teaches that we must rise above self. It teaches that we must try to see from a wider perspective, a higher altitude.

The normal pattern of human growth is to develop a strong ego in adolescence, then grow out of it (to a lesser or greater extent) with the maturity of adulthood. But those who despise religion -- who militantly denounce and decry it -- seem, for the most part, never to have outgrown that adolescent infatuation with the self. For all their sometimes formidable intellectual attainments, they remain trapped in the narcissism, alienation, and confused insecurity of their teenage years. And they prove it by relying on the weapons of immaturity -- barbed words, taunts and jibes, name-calling, and petulant profanities intended to shock their elders. Like smart but alienated kids, they formulate flimsy generalizations to rationalize their wounded feelings. They imagine themselves superior to the rest of the world -- certainly to the bovine, knuckle-dragging, irrational masses. Arrogant and insecure, militant and defensive, they are prone to angry sarcasm one moment and grandiloquent oratory the next. Furiously resentful at any authority higher than the ego, they lash out at anything redolent of authority or tradition, God above all. They are, in short, perpetual adolescents, ever-angry teenagers, creatures of vanity and narcissism, avatars of the self.

There is an old religious teaching that says we create our personal hell when we cling to the ego at the expense of spiritual growth. We ignore such teachings at our cost.

Ms. Angier ends her remarks with an apology to Daniel Dennett, whom she celebrates as a rare scientist willing to fight for atheism. In her column she misidentified his university affiliation, placing him at Temple instead of Tufts. Dennett, she writes, told her, "You're forgiven the Temple bit ... Hey, it may come in handy if some nutcase goes hunting for me."

Yes, you know how those religious nutcases can be. Not at all like the "careful and fair" Natalie Angier, mounted bravely on the parapets, with a spray can in her hand and a thumb in God's eye.