If most people agree that a god is intentionally unprovable, then faith is a matter of early socialization and perhaps of mental health for those who need to believe in a strength outside of themselves in order to cope with life. I appreciate DNA’s writing largely because he could see the absurd in life and make it vivid. His writing about religion was most funny because if it didn’t cause laughter it’s truth would be unbearable. Unfortunately, the ludicrous which is funny in DNA’s writing is tragic in real life, where people commit atrocities for what amounts to no reason at all.

To the extent that many people substitute the “magical thinking” causation for simple natural processes, or use “faith” as an excuse for lazy thinking (i.e. “intelligent design”) the intrusion of faith into rational inquiry is clearly a harmful thing. It seems to offer no particular benefits, no improvement to the understanding of the universe, just a simple placeholder for those things we do not yet understand and an excuse to not attempt to understand them. I suspect that DNA’s militant atheism, like that of many of his contemporaries, stemmed from deep frustration at seeing bad thinkers waste their little reason stuck in religious mumbo jumbo and good thinkers waste CPU cycles worried about the irrelevancy of an unproveable assertion.

To the extent that superb thinkers, the Ensteins of the world, can cleanly differentiate their instinctual or socialized belief in a higher power from their passion for scientific inquiry, faith is at least not apparently harmful. Would their inquiry be any less effective absent that socialized belief in “something else out there?” Clearly many gifted scientists have been out-and-out atheists (or, more often, simply people with no patience for something with no possible impact on their lives or work). There’s no way to do a side-by-side comparison between unique geniuses.

My own answer to your final inquiry would be “life is short, surely that time could be best spent driving scientific inquiry to the very limits of its potential. Worrying about whether it fails at the fringes takes time away from filling in the immense spaces that it is well able to describe.”

Someone with a mind far outstripping any of ours said: “The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.” -Carl Sagan