I would take the opposite view. To me, religion is a kind of fossilized science: an earlier, outmoded attempt at a theory of reality that continues to be clung to, long past its sell-by date.

My problem with religion is precisely with its purporting to be a moral philosophy. What have ethics and morality—how we behave toward one another—to do with the nature and origins of material reality? Why would the creative power at the heart of existence, which has created the lion to prey on the lamb and meteorites to extinguish entire biomes, care if I covet my neighbor’s ox?

It’s all just an abdication of responsibility, a way of shifting the burden onto a “Higher Power” to avoid the hard work of forming our own ethical judgments and choices. It’s the morality of a six-year-old, enforced by the threat of parental punishment for misbehavior. Adult humans are guided by their own ethical sense, not by fear of reprisal by Big Daddy in the Sky. Morality is a purely human concern, not a divine one.