the scientist as Nietzsche's superman(is the new atheism the new facism?)

It is becoming increasingly obvious to me, a priest who reads the scientific press, religiously, every week, that the likes of Dick Dorkins are not promoting a new, peaceful humanity free of religious dogmatism, but are advocating a return to the scientific arrogance of the late 19th. Century that gave rise to eugenics and eventually the wars, the dictatorships and the genocide of the 20th. Century. All they now need is a modern day Wagner to give them a musical accompaniment.

Their is an excellent article by Paul Vallely today in
THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY which examines the causes of this bitter scientism. It begins by relating the story of Professor Reiss, a non-stipendiary priest, who was hounded out of his job as chief education officer for the Royal Society:

''A clergyman in charge of education for the country's leading scientific organisation – it's a Monty Python sketch," pronounced Britain's top atheist, Richard Dawkins, recently.

The problem was that Reiss, as well as being an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist, is a non-stipendiary priest in the Church of England. When he said recently that science teachers should answer questions about creationism if pupils asked them he was deemed to have been advocating the idea that British schools should teach the idea that the world was magicked up (complete with fossils and ancient geology) just 6,000 years ago – and then tell pupils to make their own minds up between that and the theory of evolution to which the overwhelming scientific evidence points.

The hapless Reiss made it clear that he insists creationism is scientific nonsense. But a handful of the Royal Society's most eminent members began a campaign to have him sacked. Sir Harry Kroto, Sir Richard Roberts and Sir John Sulston said in a letter to the president of the Royal Society: "We gather Professor Reiss is a clergyman, which in itself is very worrisome." We must all now be on the look-out, it now seems for Revs under the beds.

If you do not find this as worrisome as the thought of Mrs Palin becoming vice president of the U.S. then what the feck are you doing hanging around my blog?

Vallely then goes on to explain how American fundamentalism, with its need to control, has created the backlash of atheistic fundamentalism, with its own, just as unyielding, need to control. He finishes his article with the following paragraph, the reading of which should make you want to rush over and read the original article in full:

Perhaps the conflict is not between science and religion but between good and bad ways of doing both. In all of us there will always be a struggle between the craving for certainty, purity and closure and the acceptance of mystery, brokenness and provisionality. At their best, both scientists and people of faith are in a permanent state of awe-struck humility before the wonder and strangeness and messiness of things. At their worst, they are arrogant, dogmatic, and incurious. There's a bit of both in all of us, of course.