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"Can biology do better than faith?” asks Edward O. Wilson in a not-so-recent-but-still-dangerous issue of The New Scientist. Wilson, much esteemed professor of entomology and well-published public intellectual, finds the hot third rail in disputes about evolution and creationism (or it’s doppelganger intelligent design) to be scientific humanism.  The first two rails are, predictably, the tribal, monotheistic, man-in-his-image vision of the world and the godless ennui of twentieth-century, pseudo-scientific, socially-engineered political utopia. The second, filled with failed socialism and a failing social democratic agenda, can no longer be sustained by the greying radicals trying to prop it up.  The first, Wilson writes, will always be in conflict with scientific humanism especially, it seems, as science moves into its inevitable acsendance. Wilson concludes:

So, will science and religion find common ground, or at least agree to divide the fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains? A great many well-meaning scholars believe that such rapprochement is both possible and desirable. A few disagree, and I am one of them...Rapprochement may be neither possible nor desirable. There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.

Take heart, fellow atheists...Professor Wilson sees rational days ahead. More here..

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