Category: Science and Religion: Confrontation or Accommodation?

When the Council for Secular Humanism celebrated its thirtieth anniversary at last October’s gala conference in Los Angeles, one of the most-anticipated sessions was a panel discussion on freethinkers’ attitudes toward religion. Should secular humanists, atheists, agnostics, and others of our ilk approach religion from a presumption of confrontation—or one of accommodation? New York Times …

Five years ago, I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. The trial concerned the legality of a policy of teaching intelligent design (ID) in Dover, Pennsylvania, public schools. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE), my organization, acted as advisor to the plaintiff’s legal team on scientific, pedagogical, and religious issues …

I’m going to begin with where I entered this conflict—and make no mistake, it’s a real battle—with my experience in science education and specifically with the teaching of evolution. Biology has been a lifelong passion for me, and when I first began teaching back in the 1980s, it was a shock to discover students who …

Speaking as a physicist, I would like to give you several examples from my own field where the unwillingness of scientists to engage in serious confrontation with religion results in the public being widely misinformed about what science says about religion and spirituality. Most professional scientific societies have followed the lead of the National Academy …

I believe we should, for the most part, be “accommodating” toward religion (though I don’t like that term). And I believe that we atheists and humanists and freethi nkers should strive to avoid fighting among ourselves about religion. We share 99 percent of our intellectual DNA; it only makes sense that we should be able …