The God of the gaps. The rise of fundamentalism has given
credibility to the view of religion as a retreat from reason. So
is faith anything more than a refuge of the ignorant? By Edward
Skidelsky  An Intelligent Person's Guide to Religion John
Haldane Duckworth, 224pp, £12.99 ISBN 07  Sophisticated young
secularists increasingly think of religion as something scary,
as a kind of voodoo or brainwashing. This is hardly surprising,
given that their images of it derive mainly from Southern
Baptists, al-Qaeda and films such as The Exorcist. But ignorance
is not entirely to blame. The rise of fundamentalism has given
some credibility to the view of religion as a retreat from
reason. What has almost disappeared is the traditional Catholic
portrayal of faith as consistent with, indeed as the perfection
of, reason. An Intelligent Person's Guide to Religion is a lucid
and timely restatement of this classic position.  John Haldane
is a Catholic philosopher, a professor at the University of St
Andrews, with a solid back