For religionists to position themselves against scientists is a very old tradition, but it feels like things are getting worse. Today’s New York Times features a front page story under the headline: Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets. The story details increasing efforts by people hostile to teaching evolution as solid science, to broaden their campaign and include in it fighting against teaching about global warming and cloning.
Whatever one thinks about each of these issues individually, linking them together and campaigning against them accordingly, demonstrates that those who do so are animated primarily by hostility to scientific inquiry more than an anything else. Such people fail to distinguish between evolution which is an explanatory theory, global warming which is a hypothesis, and cloning which is a technological procedure. The only think which links them is that they are all part of the world of science.
It’s quite sad to see people marshal their faith to provide window dressing for a set of fears and hostilities which are about something altogether separate from faith. It’s sad to see people use God as a prop in their arguments. That strikes me as the opposite of faith.

There is room for debate about evolution, global warming and cloning. But the debates are not the same because the status of the science which supports them is not the same and the ethical challenges presented by them are not the same either. By lumping them all together, those who do so, demonstrate that what really scares them is novelty, inquiry and human empowerment.
Is their faith so weak, or their contempt for people so great, that it is threatened by new human questions and new human capacity? If it is, then they should work on themselves, not rage at others. If it is not, then they should ask how their faith can contribute to the asking of better questions and creating greater ethical awareness about the technological capacity which we have developed at a far quicker pace than the ethical consciousness which would help us use it best.
Religionists are right when they point out the limits of what science can and should teach us. But so too are there limits on what religion can and should teach us. How ironic that those who are most sensitive about the first principle are so often unaware, and even hostile to, the second.