A thoughtful opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum does a good job at pointing out the struggle between religious believers and adherents of science isn’t only being waged by conservative Christian organizations. Some nonbelievers are also lobbing rounds at those who seek to hold to the middle ground and say that religion and science are, at many levels, compatible.
Mooney and Kirshenbaum, authors of the book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, highlight some of the prominent atheist writers and scientists who are lambasting scientific organizations that espouse a third way: The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Center for Science Education, in particular.
The arguments of the nonbelievers — sometimes styled as the “New Atheists” — boil down to essentially the same claim as that of their religious opposites: Science and faith are incompatible. Yet the authors of the editorial find a very clear downside to either group achieving dominance in this long-running argument.
“It all might sound like a petty internecine squabble, but the stakes are very high,” write Mooney and Kirshenbaum. “The United States does not boast a very healthy relationship between its scientific community and its citizenry. The statistics on public scientific illiteracy are notorious — and they’re at their worst on contentious, politicized issues such as climate change and the teaching of evolution. About 46% of Americans in polls agree with this stunning statement: ‘God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.'”
Because the New Atheists and the scientific organizations have the same goal — increasing scientific literacy in America — it seems ironic that they find themselves at odds with one another. And the editorial’s authors find a great way to highlight this irony: Calling upon Charles Darwin’s own words.
“It turns out that late in life, when an atheist author asked permission to dedicate a book to Darwin, the great scientist wrote back his apologies and declined. For as Darwin put it, ‘Though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follows from the advance of science.'”
That gradual method, as it happens, is the one being advocated by the scientific organizations.