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Reason for Faith

The two ideals need not be rivals.

Oct 19, 2009, Vol. 15, No. 05 • By RYAN T. ANDERSON
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Galileo Goes to Jail

And Other Myths about
Science and Religion

Edited by Ronald L. Numbers

Harvard, 320 pp., $27.95

The past few years have brought a revival of a largely 19th-century phenomenon: the attempt to deploy science to discredit religion. We've seen Richard Dawkins use evolutionary biology to explain away our God Delusion while Victor Stenger co-opted physics to explain that God is The Failed Hypothesis and Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. Daniel Dennett went to work Breaking the Spell to show Religion as a Natural [not supernatural] Phenomenon, while Sam Harris wrote A Letter to a Christian Nation noting The End of Faith. We've been warned about The Theocons and the Christianists, today's theocrats attempting to set up an American Theocracy.

The story is always the same: a battle between irrational faith and rational science, in which the latter defeats the former. Of course, the real force behind these books is politics, especially where it intersects with morality. The new atheists aren't really concerned about baptisms or bar mitzvahs; they simply deplore the moral, political, and cultural values advanced by traditional Jews and Christians, and readily denounce all religious believers in an effort to discredit them. And of course, science is manipulated as the weapon of choice.

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