Evolution News & Views: The Church of Science: Losing Our Religion?

Surely only an extraordinarily confident secular priesthood, that of scientists, would adventure so far from its traditional use as mere describer of physical reality. The fact that specifically materialist science takes on trappings of faith - a Church of Science - demonstrates how strong the range of that skill in our culture really is.

Or could the contrary be true?

Considered from a dissimilar perspective, the bigotry of the Church of Science looks like desperate frustration, the increasingly strident, screechy insistence of a parent unable to regulate his children. No less a cultural observer than President Obama lamented recently that voters were unfriendly to and unappreciative of "facts and science," represented by himself and his Administration, due to quirks in our evolutionary "hard-wiring."

A writer in Wired magazine, disturbed by increasingly widespread doubts about climate change, advocates a massive (and pathetic) PR campaign: Assemble two groups of spokespeople, one made up of scientists and the early of celebrity ambassadors. Then deploy them to make the world wherever they are, from online social networks to The Now Show. Researchers need to separate personal stories, tug at the heartstrings of people who don't have PhDs. And the celebrities can go on Oprah to discover how climate change is affecting them - and by extension, Oprah's legions of viewers.Actually, far from confidence, the Church of Science evidences much of the crispness of the ancient pagan religion of Rome before the surface and spreading of Christianity. In the 1st centuries of the Common Era, some Roman intellectuals mercilessly picked apart the traditional pagan religion, holding it up for mockery. In The Story of the Fall and Light of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon recounts how this cultivation of doubt trickled down to average people, undermining their confidence in the old gods.

The traditional mold of worship was respectable. But it was like a house held up by beams that have rotted from inside. In the end, most people but half-believed, at most, in the old religion. Even the defensive priests sleepwalked through it.

No one in the 1st century would have predicted the precipitous collapse of paganism and its substitution by the once obscure Greco-Palestinian religion of Christianity, all inside the space of a few centuries.

In our own day, doubts and apprehensions about materialism are barely suppressed, as the argument about Darwinian evolution illustrates. The rustling, nervous tension emanating from the Church of Science may call the coming retirement of materialist dogmatism and the revival of true science. Dominant paradigms and worldviews seem permanent. Yet they take a way of shifting - not overnight but with what is still, seen in retrospect, an astonishing speed.