The Devil's Delusion

If nothing else, the attack on traditional religious thought marks the consolidation in our time of science as the single system of belief in which rational men and women might place their faith, and if not their faith, then certainly their devotion. From cosmology to biology, its narratives have become the narratives. They are, these narratives, i

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,” the geneticist Richard Lewontin remarked equably in The New York Review of Books, “in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories

This would not be the first time that an ideological system in conflict with the facts has found it prudent to defer to itself. And with predictably incoherent results.

The thesis that we are all nothing more than vehicles for a number of “selfish genes” has accordingly entered deeply into the simian gabble of academic life, where together with materialism and moral relativism it now seems as self-evident as the law of affirmative action.

What astronomical observations may, in fact, have demonstrated is that the earth is no more numerous than a single grain of sand on a vast beach. Significance is, of course, otherwise. Nonetheless, the inference is plain: What holds for the earth holds as well for human beings. They hardly count, and scientists like Stenger are not disposed to coun

Science as an institution is unified by the lowest common denominator of belief, and that is the conviction that science is a very good thing.

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought. The yearnings of the human soul are not in vain. There is a system of belief adequate to the complexity of experience. There is recompense for suffering.

Confident assertions by scientists that in the privacy of their chambers they have demonstrated that God does not exist have nothing to do with science, and even less to do with God’s existence.