Just when you thought things couldn’t get any sillier, now Sam Harris, author of “Letter to a Christian Nation” publishes a letter in Nature calling all good scientists to oppose religion at every turn. Unfortunately for Sam, the letter is frought with inaccuracies and mischaracterizations that would make PiZza Myers proud. He even goes so far as to scold Nature for not taking a hard enough line against this pernicious evil.
Nature 448, 864 (23 August 2007) | doi:10.1038/448864a;  Published online 22
August 2007
Scientists should unite against threat from religion
Sam Harris1
    1      Address withheld by request http://www.samharris.org
Sir
It was genuinely alarming to encounter Ziauddin Sardar’s whitewash of Islam
in the pages of your journal (‘Beyond the troubled relationship’ Nature 448,
131-133; 2007). Here, as elsewhere, Nature’s coverage of religion has been
unfailingly tactful – to the point of obscurantism.
In his Commentary, Sardar seems to accept, at face value, the claim that
Islam constitutes an “intrinsically rational world view”. Perhaps there are
occasions where public intellectuals must proclaim the teachings of Islam to
be perfectly in harmony with scientific naturalism. But let us not do so,
just yet, in the world’s foremost scientific journal.
Under the basic teachings of Islam, the Koran cannot be challenged or
contradicted, being the perfect word of the creator of the Universe. To
speak of the compatibility of science and Islam in 2007 is rather like
speaking of the compatibility of science and Christianity in the year 1633,
just as Galileo was being forced, under threat of death, to recant his
understanding of the Earth’s motion.
An Editorial announcing the publication of Francis Collins’s book, The
Language of God (‘Building bridges’ Nature 442, 110; doi:10.1038/442110a
2006) represents another instance of high-minded squeamishness in addressing
the incompatibility of faith and reason. Nature praises Collins, a devout
Christian, for engaging “with people of faith to explore how science – both
in its mode of thought and its results – is consistent with their religious
beliefs”.
But here is Collins on how he, as a scientist, finally became convinced of
the divinity of Jesus Christ: “On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in
the Cascade Mountains… the majesty and beauty of God’s creation
overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and
unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was
over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and
surrendered to Jesus Christ.”
What does the “mode of thought” displayed by Collins have in common with
science? The Language of God should have sparked gasping outrage from the
editors at Nature. Instead, they deemed Collins’s efforts “moving” and
“laudable”, commending him for building a “bridge across the social and
intellectual divide that exists between most of US academia and the
so-called heartlands.”
At a time when Muslim doctors and engineers stand accused of attempting
atrocities in the expectation of supernatural reward, when the Catholic
Church still preaches the sinfulness of condom use in villages devastated by
AIDS, when the president of the United States repeatedly vetoes the most
promising medical research for religious reasons, much depends on the
scientific community presenting a united front against the forces of
unreason.
There are bridges and there are gangplanks, and it is the business of
journals such as Nature to know the difference.