Science vs. Religion - Time to Take the Gloves Off?
Date: November 27, 2006
Time: 11:10pm est

Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary scientist. He holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Dawkins has expended many years of his life trying to convince people that the real enemy of human progress is religion. With the publication of his most recent, best-selling book The God Delusion -any doubts about the book's central thesis?-Dawkins has become the poster-boy and spokesperson for a new, trendy and much more vociferous form of anti-religious scientism. Shall we call it a movement? Time will tell, I guess, but it sure is trendy, and it sure is getting the headlines, including a cover-story in the November 13 issue of Time magazine entitled "God vs. Science," an interview between Dawkins and Dr. Francis Collins, a Christian evangelical and one of the pioneering heads of the Human Genome Project. Well worth a read, the interview, crafted and introduced by Time 's David van Biema, notes that there has been a spate of best-selling, scientistic, anti-religion books of which Dawkins' is just the latest. Last February there was philoso pher Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon . And in a follow up to his 2004 The End of Faith, neuroscience grad student Samuel Harris has just published Letter to a Christian Nation. Add to that the recent announcement that the Center for Inquiry (a Buffalo-based secular humanist think-tank) has set up shop in D.C. with the mission of protecting American politics from "the undue influence of religious orthodoxy." And add to that a recent forum at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, CA, entitled: "Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival." From accounts in a recent New York Times article (November 21) and from a friend who was present, it seems the La Jolla meeting was in large part an emotionally charged brain-storming session on how to break religion's death-grip on human progress. "An intellectual disgrace," says my friend, "with undertones of sacred violence grounded in the new group-think called 'science.'" The New York Times offered this assessment:

"With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?"

But ah, there's the rub. A scientism that claims to have the corner on the market of reason is, well, just that: ideology-born, to be sure, in the 18 th century. Some advocates of scientism may feel it's time to take the gloves off and fight back against the "religious right." I ask myself: what is really at the basis of their grievance? I have no sympathy for genuinely anti-science attitudes that might be proffered in some sectors of conservative America. My approach to science has been formed within the Catholic tradition of enthusiastic openness toward scientific endeavor-a tradition, by the way, which is on record as upholding an intellectual openness even to the theory of evolution to the extent that it can be compatible with the data of revelation. Those of us in this line of understanding don't have to take the gloves off because we never put them on in the first place. As anti-religious scientism becomes more vocal (and likely more hysterical), I hope the rest of us will settle down to a continued meaningful dialogue between science and religion, those of us, that is, who believe that reason is the steward of both of these great domains of human experience.

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Fr. Thomas Berg is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.