“Another missing link in the atheist's relationship with empirical science concerns understanding how scientific research is conducted and the central human role in it. From conversations with atheists, we find a naive picture of a scientist emerging from the laboratory in a white coat to announce a result to the world, surrounded by colleagues who have endorsed and praised the discovery and repeated the experiment several times before approving it. Only someone whose link to empirical science consists of newspaper reports would follow such a naive picture.”
