Yes; he did it much better.

I have seen Mormon bloggers in particular sing the story's praises, but I tend to feel they are parti pris.

For myself, I was mentally comparing it with the explorations of religion found in novels like C.S. Lewis’s trilogy, A Case of Conscience by James Blish, The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., and Raising the Stones by Sheri S. Tepper; and James Morrow's collection Bible Stories for Adults. I didn't feel that "That Leviathan, Which Thou Hast Made" was anywhere near any of those in terms of quality.

To be honest, the very first sentence jarred me badly, when the narrator tells us "that wasn’t why my palm sweat slicked the plastic pulpit of the station’s multidenominational chapel". It seemed to me a clumsy sentence, and there were many more that felt the same to me; no matter how sympathetic I may be to the subject matter, that will always put me off.

Edited at 2011-06-13 09:21 am (UTC)

I don't know, I'm a lifelong semi-militant atheist and my first reaction to the story was positive, as was Lois Tilton's from the Locus comments, which also have a religious person condemning the story. So a correlation with religion doesn't seem very tight.

I'd call it a bunch of fun ideas in a flawed story, with yes a rather pulpy first sentence.