Here are some things I worry about: the many-more-than-usual term papers on science and religion in my “Science and Values” class this year—several observing that “atheism is a religion”; those dreadful television programs about Angels, Miracles, and Unexplained Phenomena; a report in the Wall Street Journal on a conference co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Dalai Lama, averring that “science and faith are making nice almost everywhere”; articles in Newsweek about God and Health, Women in the Bible, and Billy Graham’s Last Crusade; continuing struggles over science teaching in public schools, now in the form of evolution disclaimers—“it’s only a theory”—in biology textbooks; religious resistance to stem-cell research; a U.S. president who, instead of merely giving lip-service to religion, apparently really believes that evangelical stuff.
But, as Nietzsche wrote in The Anti-Christ, “we all still have bad instincts, Christian instincts, somewhere within us,” drawing us away from “the free view of reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the whole integrity of knowledge.”
So here are some other things I worry about: that we will allow those annoying encroachments of religion to loom much larger than they should; that we will be more distressed than we ought to be by the fact that the (brilliant) compromise of the First Amendment inevitably means ongoing wrangles over just where the line is to be drawn between free exercise of religion and government entanglement; that we will forget how far we have come in the eighty years since John Scopes was fined one hundred dollars for teaching evolution; that we will confuse resistance to state-sanctioned religion with insistence on state-sanctioned irreligion; that atheism will really become, as someone taught those students to say it is, a kind of religion, with its own articles of non-faith.
Susan Haack is Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Law at the University of Miami. Her most recent book is Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Prometheus, 2003).
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