For many, religion has retreated to an irrational 'faith' in the pejorative sense used by Dawkins. It has become a personal experience, purely subjective, safe from the humiliation of scientific disproof. Therefore two mutually exclusive subsets now exist within the universal set of 'knowledge' or 'reality'. One is the 'objective' realm of scientific proof, the other is the 'subjective' realm of transcendental religious experience. The gaps are closing and a rational God is being squeezed out.
Positivism is by no means universally accepted by scientists.
The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative forever. It may indeed be corroborated, but every corroboration is relative to other statements which, again, are tentative. The world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. We should be able to 'appeal to evidence' and 'justify' our views to Richard Dawkins, and we also should maintain a 'persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth'.