Observe the past tense in your statement. Since the dawn of modernity, science, even when it is practiced in a relatively religious country such as the United States, has required no particular belief in any kind of God or gods -- if it did, atheists and agnostics here would have trouble participating in science, let alone excelling in it. Many -- perhaps most -- of the early modern scientists had (sometimes strongly held) prejudices against women, non-whites, laborers, and other oppressed human beings that were rooted in the relations of power of their times, but that doesn't make science inherently sexist, racist, Eurocentric, etc. In short, any connection that obtained between science and religion in the past was as much an accident of history as any connection that obtained -- and may still obtain, scientists having had a harder time leaving sexism, racism, and so on behind than religion -- between science and sexism, science and racism, and so on.
>I said "rabid" because nearly all the atheists writing on this list
>have basically used outright insults or insults by inuendo in
>arguing their case. To quote an article that asserts that
>"scientists by and large don't believe in God" is the same as saying
>that anyone with intelligence is too "smart" for God. That's what
>finally made me write something, to remind people that modern
>science basically started with a religious reform movement.
An opinion survey, like any collection of empirical data, merely discloses facts. What values you attach to them through your interpretation is up to you. If a survey of scientists revealed most of them to be vegetarians and the greatest among them to be vegans, that wouldn't mean that meat-eaters were too dumb to become scientists, unless you have a habit of deifying scientists.
That at the dawn of modernity, intellectuals in Europe, mostly living in countries where religious observance was de rigeur and charges of atheism and heresies consequential, attempted to reconcile science and religion through natural theology doesn't mean that science today requires it. We ought to celebrate the freedom of conscience: scientists are free to believe or not to believe in any God, and most of them don't; and theologians, clerics, and lay leaders of any religion worth its name (be they of Catholicism, Mainline Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, or any other faith), perfectly at home in modernity (cf. see Dietrich Bonhoeffer's view of "the world come of age" and the necessity to live in it "_etsi Deus non daretur_" at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050606/012139.html>), take as their spiritual starting point the fact of exploitation and oppressions of human beings rather than seek God in the laws of nature, trying to supplant or compete with scientists (which only fundamentalists do): "critical theology seeks first of all to disclose the setting of the church in the life of the people: is it a power of repression and an accomplice of domination, or is it the home of the poor and a power for their liberation?" (Jürgen Moltmann, _Theology Today_, Trans. John Bowden, London: SCM Press; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1988, p. 20). You would be more ignorant of religion than science, if you believed that you had to equate religion with science or else religion would be of no worth at all. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>