Templeton conversation: Does science make belief in God obsolete?

If you are familiar with the Templeton Foundation, you know that they are in the business of addressing the "big questions" through scientific investigation. This usually boils down to the Foundation giving a million dollars every year to a scientist who "finds God." This morning I found a collection of essays on the Foundation's Web site about whether scientific advances have made belief in God unnecessary. While there's not really any chance of any of these essays changing my mind, I find the topic endlessly interesting, so I'm going to read all of the essays and comment on them here.

The first is by Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist. He argues that, defining science broadly as a process of empirical investigation, it has answered many of the questions once accounted for by belief in God. Pinker writes that, while science cannot directly explain what is right or wrong, the notion that theism has anything useful to say on the matter is fallacious. The origin of morality is a really intriguing question, and I enjoy Pinker's take on it:

It's not just that the traditional Judeo-Christian God endorsed genocide, slavery, rape, and the death penalty for trivial insults. It's that morality cannot be grounded in divine decree, not even in principle. Why did God deem some acts moral and others immoral? If he had no reason but divine whim, why should we take his commandments seriously? If he did have reasons, then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

The fact is that even people who believe in God exercise some individual judgment over what they think is moral. Almost no one purports to believe every moral dictum in the bible, not least because it contradicts itself in several places. When one resolves one of those contradictions (i.e. rationalizes which one God really meant), one appeals to some standard other than the word of God. If theists are allowed to do that, why not atheists? If it's acceptable on some questions, why not all?

I look forward to reading the rest of these essays, and some of the comments on the left side of the page are worth a look as well.