Religion & Science, God & Politics: not such strange bedfellows
after all  Jun 2, 2008 by  John Gray, author of Black Mass:
Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, reviews David
Berlinski’s The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific
Pretensions in the Globe and Mail Saturday:  The idea that the
practice of science is at odds with religious commitment has
long been part of conventional wisdom. In the 18th century, the
philosophers of the French Enlightenment argued that science is
the voice of reason while religion is little more than blind
faith. Only by embracing science as the one true source of
genuine knowledge, they argued, can humankind be rid of
superstition.  A glance at the longer sweep of history shows
this Enlightenment view to be misguided. Doubt has been an
integral part of religion at least since the Book of Job, while
science has often gone with credulity. The doctrines of
dialectical materialism and “scientific racism” promoted by
communists and Nazis, respectively, during the 20th