A lot of blogging words have been spilled over Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, which I have now read. My opinion is that the major criticisms leveled at the book are generally fair and I have no intention or desire to pick through those again. Rather, I would like to point out a small part of the infamous Chapter 8 that rubbed me the wrong way. That part begins with:

At a recent conference…an audience member asked a panel of Nobel laureates whether a true scientist could also believe in God. Chemist Herbert Hauptman answered with a definitive “No!” … Yet historical scholarship on the complex interactions between science and religion contradicts Hauptman’s simplistic assertion. A great many leading lights of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment…were distinctly religious and viewed science as a better means of understanding God’s creation and the laws governing it.

They then cite the book Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives by John H. Brooke, which I have read. On this point they are correct, of course. As Brooke argues, individual and community relationships between science and religion run the gamut from conflict to harmony and everything in-between. Many scientists were and are religious. A scientist can believe in God. A better question, however, might have been whether a scientist (or anybody for that matter) should believe in God.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum then wrap up the section by complaining that the New Atheists are “historically incorrect about the relationship between science and religion” for supposedly asserting that science and religion are conflicting.

It is important, however, that one can make the distinction between a historical argument (that is the way it was) and a normative argument (that is the way it should be). The New Atheists, so far as I am familiar with their work, are not making historical arguments when they claim that science and religion are fundamentally at odds. They are making a philosophical argument. In other words, they are arguing, against the harmonizers and accomodationists, that religious faith is fundamentally irrational and that science is methodologically the only real game in town when it comes to seeking knowledge about the reality in which we live. That many scientists can incorporate unsupported and irrational beliefs into their science and their worldview – while historically quite true – does not mean that such an exercise is good or desirable.

And that is one of the fundamental problems that I had with this book. Mooney and Kirshenbaum in their effort to increase scientific literacy and acceptance, ironically, want us to not criticize the anti-scientific ideas of religious believers so that they might accept a theory or two.