A reader writes

A reader writes:

Does this strike you as bizarrely idolatrous as it does me?

In the UK, many of us don’t value science as much as we should. It lives beneath the surface of everything we touch and taste. It is the key to our prosperity, one of the driving forces of our economy, and it creates thousands of jobs that keep Britain at the leading edge.

So let’s look again at science: what is it doing for us already? How is it going to drive us to a better future? Why not take a look around, and see how science is touching you.

I’m a Physics Ph.D. student — I ‘get’ that we should ‘value’ science, but it isn’t some almighty force that must be appeased, lest it open its cavernous mouth and consume the science infidels.

The site as a whole seems rather harmless, but the blurb above just had to be commented on.

As soon as I read this I thought of what Chesterton would say about it, which led me to think, “what would Mark say about it?”

Sadly, Chesterton is not here, and I am no Chesterton except in girth. However, the site you send me to seems fairly pale in comparison to New Atheist fools like Dawkins, who really do seem to think that science is not merely a tool for measuring stuff, but an All-Explaining Paradigm for All of Existence. This is, of course, utterly insane and inhuman, but it is one of the marks of our humanity that we are able to make ourselves inhuman in ways that no tiger could ever dream of making himself untigerish or a gorilla could ever make himself ungorillaish. What makes this possible is precisely our incorrigible drive to to worship. Dawkins, being a fool, worships science and, if he had his way, would ruin millions of families and destroy millions of lives in order to force other humans to stop worshipping God and start worshipping science. His insane demands to remove children from religious homes on the grounds that religious education is child abuse make pretty clear what an elite leadership of Dawkins followers would look like in power. But such inhuman behavior would owe its existence to one thing only: a fanatical religious ideal. For human have no choice about whether they will worship. They will, come hell or high water. They only have a choice about what they will worship. And in the final analysis, that choice will boil down to the worship of God or the worship of self.