VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Tesh|DATE|1382355464|CONTENT|Own personal thoughts over interview, written last December: part 1
I think what bothers me most [i.e bothered me most in December 2012], is a feeling that great injustices have been done to both Richard Dawkins and to Peter Higgs which can only bring joy and a display of triumphalism to many. Somebody in the Sunday Times [30.12.12] e.g. has described the interview as having “aimed a thunderbolt at the head of our most gobby  atheist , Professor Richard Dawkins” and claims that “Dawkins, says Higgs is almost fundamentalist in his fervour to deny the existence of God and has become ‘embarrassing’ in his tirades”.   Meanwhile from Damian Thompson of the Daily Telegraph, 1st January:
“Now Prof Dawkins has been criticised by Prof Peter Higgs, discoverer of the Higgs boson particle, who although a non-believer thinks his hysterical tirades against religion are discrediting science. Perhaps we should ask Dawkins to deliver a defence of his position in an appropriate venue. May I suggest the top of a late-night bus?”

Now read or re-read the interview itself.  Nowhere does Higgs say this. Meanwhile this site  waxed wrathful on “the extraordinary ignorance of the legendary Peter Higgs”.  I hope this was a rhetorical statement if not actually a rhetorical question.  Higgs happens to disagree with Dawkins on certain points -  in particular he does not see a total incompatibility of science and religion at least insofar as science is an activity done by actual people in the real world.   Higgs does what Dawkins does not – he points to the inconvenient fact that he knows that some of his colleagues are religious believers.  This is ‘evidence’.   This does not mean they cannot do perfectly good science, judged by scientific criteria and peer group review and evaluation.  The interviewer had named a female scientist I had never hear of [so what’s new?!!] Fabiola Gianotti, the director of the Atlas experiment in CERN, who declared that she was a believer and that for her there was no conflict between her  scientific work and her Catholic faith.  Are we just going to call her a liar?   Higgs  does not mention him, but Abdus Salam won a Nobel prize for physics in 1979 in a field that contributed to the CERN-Higgs Bosun project.   He regarded his brand of Islam as an inspiration behind his mathematical and scientific research.  He grieved that the ‘golden age’ of Islamic science [some of it used by Copernicus] was defeated by ‘zealous divines’ given too much power.  He came to suffer himself from such power.  
Alan Sokal [in ‘Beyond the Hoax]  also pays tribute to four centuries of Islamic science. 
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