God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (51 page)

4
. In 2009, my wife and I stayed at the same hotel, the Metropole. A group photo of the participants in the 1927 conference, which includes all the greatest physicists of the time, from Einstein on down, is prominently displayed in the lobby.

5
. Werner Heisenberg,
Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations
(London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1971).

6
. Edward J. Larson, “Leading Scientists Still Reject God,”
Nature
294, no. 6691 (1998): 313.

7
. Elaine Howard Ecklund and Christopher P. Scheitle, “Religion among American Scientists: Distinctions, Disciplines, and Demographics,”
Social Problems
54, no. 2 (2007): 289–307.

8
. Elaine Howard Ecklund,
Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 5.

9
. Ibid., p. 6.

10
. Ibid., p. 7.

11
. Daniel C. Dennett,
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
(New York: Viking, 2006).

12
. Ecklund,
Science vs. Religion
, p. 51.

13
. Robert Wuthnow,
After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998).

14
. Ecklund,
Science vs. Religion
, p. 59.

15
. Ian G. Barbour,
Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

16
. Ibid., p. 66.

17
. Ibid., p. 67.

18
. Ibid., p. 69.

19
. Alfred North Whitehead et al.,
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology
, corrected ed. (New York: Free Press, 1978).

20
. Ibid., p. 154.

21
. Ibid., p. 135.

22
. Ibid.

23
. Ibid., p.136.

24
. Victor J. Stenger,
God: The Failed Hypothesis
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007).

25
. Barbour,
Religion and Science
, p. 153.

26
. Ibid., p. 159.

13. FROM CONFLICT TO INCOMPATIBILITY

1
. Jerry A. Coyne, “Science and Religion Aren't Friends,”
USA Today
(October 11, 2010).

2
. Pew Research Center, “World Publics Welcome Global Trade—But Not Immigration: October 4, 2007,”
http://pewglobal.org/files/pdf/258.pdf
(accessed March 8, 2011); see fig. 1.1 on p. 24 of Victor J. Stenger,
Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009).

3
. Gregory Paul, “The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions,”
Evolutionary Psychology
7, no. 3 (2009): 398–441.

4
. Frederick Solt, Philip Habel, and J. Tobin Grant, “Economic Inequality, Relative Power, and Religiosity,”
Social Science Quarterly
92, no. 2 (2011): 447–65.

5
. James A. Haught,
Fading Faith: The Rise of the Secular Age
(Cranford, NJ: Gustav Broukal Press, 2010).

6
. “Church Struggles with Attendance in Europe,”
NBC News
(April 20, 2005).

7
. Christopher Dickey, “Near ‘The Edge of the Abyss,’”
Newsweek
(August 15, 2005).

8
. “Who Is Secular in the World Today? A Symposium”
Religion in the News
9, no. 2 (Fall 2006).

9
. Charles M. Sennott and
Boston Globe
staff, “Catholic Church Withers in Europe,”
Boston Globe
(May 2, 2005).

10
. Steve Bruce,
God Is Dead: Secularization in the West
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002).

11
. Haught gives this reference as
Spero News
(December 6, 2005). However, I have not been able to confirm it.

12
. Hiroshi Matsubara, “Western Eyes Blind to Spirituality in Japan,”
Japan Times
(January 1, 2002).

13
. Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, “American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2008,”
http://commons.trincoll.edu/aris/
(accessed February 21, 2010).

14
. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Religion among the Millennials,” February 17, 2010,
http://pewforum.org/Age/Religion-Among-the-Millennials.aspx
(accessed March 22, 2010).

15
. Frank Newport, “More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God,” Gallup Poll (June 3, 2001),
http://www.gallup.com/poll/147887/Americans-Continue-Believe-God.aspx
(accessed June 8, 2011).

16
. Luis Lugo et al., “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, February 2008,
http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf
(accessed March 8, 2011).

17
. Haught,
Fading Faith
, pp. 25–26.

18
. Mark Chaves,
American Religion: Contemporary Trends
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

19
. Bart D. Ehrman,
Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know about Them)
(New York: HarperOne, 2009), pp. 12–15.

20
. Lugo et al., “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.”

21
. Phil Zuckerman,
Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment
(New York: New York University Press, 2008).

22
. E. Gunn, “Death by Prayer,”
Freethought Today
(September 2008): 6–7.

23
. George C. Cunningham,
Decoding the Language of God: Can a Scientist Really Be a Believer? A Geneticist Responds to Francis Collins
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), p. 56.

24
. Dinesh D'Souza,
Life after Death: The Evidence
(Washington, DC: Regnery, 2009), pp. 214–15.

25
. David Hume,
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
, ed. Henry David Aiken (New York: Hafner, 1972).

26
. National Academy of Sciences,
Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science
(Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1998), p. 58. Free copy available at
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/5787.html
.

27
. Victor J. Stenger,
The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009).

28
. Sam Harris,
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).

29
. Sam Harris,
Letter to a Christian Nation
, 1st Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).

30
. Daniel C. Dennett,
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
(New York: Viking, 2006).

31
. Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

32
. Christopher Hitchens,
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
(New York: Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2007).

33
. Victor J. Stenger,
God: The Failed Hypothesis
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007).

34
. Jerry Coyne,
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/
; Hemant Mehta,
http://friendlyatheist.com/
; P. Z. Myers,
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/;RebeccaWatson,http://skepchick.org/
.

35
. Secular Student Alliance,
http://www.secularstudents.org/
.

36
. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum,
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future
(New York: Basic Books, 2009), pp. 97–98.

14. WHY DOES IT MATTER?

1
. Kevin Phillips,
American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century
(New York: Viking, 2006), p. xv.

2
. James C. Dobson et al.,
Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Kids
(Prince Frederick, MD: Recorded Books, 2003), p. 27.

3
. Ask MetaFilter, “Academic Politics Are Vicious because the Stakes Are So Low?”
http://ask.metafilter.com/80812/Academic-politics-are-vicious-because-the-stakes-are-so-low
(accessed February 27, 2011).

4
. Kimberly Blaker, ed.
The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America
(New Boston, MI: New Boston Books, 2003).

5
. Phillips,
American Theocracy
, p. vii.

6
. Michelle Goldberg,
Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

7
. Damon Linker,
The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege
(New York: Doubleday, 2006).

8
. Chris Hedges,
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
(New York: Free Press, 2007), p. 10.

9
. Jeff Sharlet,
The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2009).

10
. Jeff Sharlet,
C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy
(New York: Little, Brown, 2010).

11
. Peter Montgomery, “Jesus Hates Taxes: Biblical Capitalism Created Fertile Anti-Union Soil,”
Religion Dispatches
(March 14, 2011).

12
. Jeff Sharlet, “This Is Not a Religion Column: Biblical Capitalism,”
Religion Dispatches
, October 1, 2008,
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/562/
(accessed April 1, 2011).

13
. William L. Fisher, “Christian Responsibility for Government,” in
Christian Coalition Leadership Manual
, ed. William L. Fisher et al. (Christian Coalition, 1990), secs. 2.5–2.8.

14
. Chris Mooney,
The Republican War on Science
(New York: Basic Books, 2005).

15
. Mooney and Kirshenbaum,
Unscientific America
.

16
. Ibid., p. 27.

17
. Ibid., p. 55.

18
. Scott Keyes, “Jim DeMint's Theory of Relativity: ‘The Bigger Government Gets, the Smaller God Gets,’”
Think Progress
(March 15, 2011).
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/03/15/demint-big-govt/
(accessed March 29, 2011).

19
. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Religion and Public Life: A Faith-Based Partisan Divide,” January 2005,
http://pewforum.org/uploadedfiles/Topics/Issues/Politics_and_Elections/religion-and-politics-report.pdf
(accessed March 17, 2011).

20
. Frank Newport, “In U.S., Very Religious Americans Still Align More with GOP,” Gallup Poll (June 27, 2011),
http://www.gallup.com/poll/148274/Religious-Americans-Align-GOP.aspx
(accessed June 28, 2011).

21
. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “The Tea Party and Religion,” February 23, 2011,
http://pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Tea-Party-and-Religion.aspx
(accessed February 23, 2011).

22
. Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox, “Religion and the Tea Party in the 2010 Elections: An Analysis of the Third Biennial American Values Survey,” Public Religion Research Institute,
http://www.publicreligion.org/objects/uploads/fck/file/AVS%202010%20Report%20FINAL.pdf
(accessed August 26, 2011).

23
. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson,
Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), pp. 148–49.

24
. Hacker and Pierson,
Winner-Take-All Politics
, p. 25.

25
. Ibid., p. 18.

26
. G. William Domhoff, “Wealth, Income, and Power,” updated November 2011,
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
(accessed March 6, 2011).

27
. Gallup Poll, April 5, 2010, “Tea Partiers Are Fairly Mainstream in Their Demographics,”
http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/tea-partiers-fairly-mainstream-demographics.aspx#1
(accessed December 26, 2011).

28
. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway,
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
(New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).

29
. Ibid., pp. 5–6.

30
. Ibid., pp. 126–35.

31
. Ibid., pp. 85–98.