Asia Times Online: by Spangler
I hate it when the bad guys are right. But it happens sometimes, and when it does, we should own up to it.
The bad guy who drove a wedge between faith and science was the 18th-century skeptic Voltaire, who did more than any other to undermine religion in the Enlightenment world. The eponymous hero of his 1759 novel Candide wanders through sundry disasters of mid-18th-century Europe, under the tutelage of “Dr Pangloss”, a lampoon of the philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who reassures him after each mishap that this is “the best of all possible worlds”.